Showing The Mormon Church NO MERCY w/ John Dehlin & Carah Burrell

Joseph Smith was a sincere believer in this, like Christian mysticism, this Christian occult practice of treasure digging. The fact is that Mormons themselves, you guys, don't believe that that's an actual believable practice of how to find things within the Earth. To put rocks into hats, we'll see if the tower falls. You got it, you got it. And say, "Yep, God's making the words appear here on this rock. Write it down. This is the most holy scripture of all time." You know that that's not how your God would actually bring you the most correct scripture on Earth through the same mechanism that Joseph Smith was doing these illegal treasure digs in. And it's true, when I was going to the temple, I literally made motions of slitting my throat, just like that. That's what we get with God's one true prophets on the earth. Take us back to pre-restoration. Take us back to the apostasy. Cuz thank you very much, Mormon prophets and revelators, we can do without your noise. Damn. We're coming for you, Russell. I'm well done. Mic drop on that. Is that okay? Yeah. I, I don't, I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just, I'm making this up. Yeah, he's making this up. Don't worry, Mormons, you're watching this. Oh no, oh no, what happened?

Hello everyone, welcome back to the podcast. My name is Cara Burell. Sometimes I go by Nu Ono. And sometimes I invite my old boss from Mormon Stories here to the Mormon history huddle. Go down. Welcome, John Dehlin. Hey, it's good to be in your studio. I think this is my first time since you Jed it up. No, you were here on my birthday. No, I mean to record something. To record something, yes. Yeah. What do you think? It's Zed. It's fully Zed. Yeah, it's epic. Epic Zed. Well, thanks for coming on. It's my pleasure. I wanted to ask John to do an episode with me here as I kind of wrap up this season one. I'm almost at 50 episodes since I started this nonprofit and this podcast back in September. So spent about a year just working out my YouTube ideas and stuff on my own after Mormon Stories and going back for the John Larson episodes. And here I am. Love the support. Love the whole ex-Mormon community. And thanks, John, for supporting me. And my pleasure. How many subs now? 52,000. That's amazing. 50,000 subs in a year. Mormon Stories took years and years, probably a decade and a half to get to 50,000 subs. And now where are you guys at? 20, 45,000. Yeah, congrats on your success. And I have one last thing to say. Okay. Go on the trip to Greece with Cara. It's low, it's a cheap price to have a blast in a really cool place with someone really cool. Are you talking about my Greece? August 26th. Crazy. September 1st. You are crazy. You are insane if you don't register to go on that trip with Cara to Greece. You're crazy. Do it now. Buy it now. It's in the description. Go to Greece with Cara or you're crazy. Full stop. Thank you. Yeah. Well, Athens, Santorini, August 26th. Just wanting to do something cool and epic. How to reconstruct a better way to move throughout the world without this type of authoritarian religion, this high-demand religion that yes, does some good things in the world, as you eloquently pointed out in the Jubilee Mormons versus Ex-Mormons video, um, but ultimately, it's just not a true thing. So what do we do now? Yeah, we listen to podcasts and we go to Greece and we live our best beautiful life. Which I think we're both doing. Right on. John, love you. Congrats on all your success. Keep the trip to Greece is happening August 26th. Link down in the description if you want to come. It's got a few more spots left. Yes, there are payment plans. I've got a whole awesome itinerary, seven days in Greece, all lined up.

Well, today John and I thought we would put together an episode of what are the top five reasons that Mormonism isn't true. Five or 10? Well, top 10 because five plus five coincidentally enough is actually 10. Okay, so top 10. The top, in other words. Yeah. Okay. And I also can't just make a regular YouTube video or explain a regular concept. We have to do it the fun way. Yeah, yeah. So I told John last night, I'm running to Target and I'm getting a Jenga set. And John told me his top five. I have five. And we decided to write them on these Jenga pieces as a metaphor, perhaps. And you can interpret the metaphor however you want. Did the wise podcast host build the Jenga Tower upon a rock? Evidently, it didn't. Uh, because these are my reasons that I left the church overall. I mean, these are my reasons that the Mormon Church isn't true. John, what made you want to make this kind of episode with me overall? Yeah, just, I mean, it's always going to be sensitive talking about people's sacred stuff, but I think something you and I share, one of the many things you and I share, is this commitment, belief in what's called informed consent. So you and I know there's a lot of Mormons out there, believing Mormons, people about to go on missions, you know, people who married into the church and just were never taught the truth about the church. So, and then there's like a gazillion. I don't know about your channel. Have you ever done a poll to ask what percentage of your audience has never been Mormon? I don't know if I have. Yeah. So my YouTube channel is like 70% never Mormon. So there's this huge hunger for people who've never been Mormon to learn about the church. Sometimes they're investigating the church, missionaries have come out to them, and they've investigated it. So part of what I believe in is informed consent. That whether you're in the church, about to go on a mission, you've been married already, and even if you're investigating the church, you deserve to know the truth about the church. So we're going to be talking about sensitive stuff. It's going to seem uncomfortable for believing Mormons, but, uh, we just want you to know our intention. It's just to speak the truth, to talk about hard stuff. And we support anyone's decision about whether they stay in the church, leave it, join it, don't join it. We just want them to do it with full knowledge. So those are my intentions. And we hope to make it fun and informative and accurate. And that's it. How about you? Well done.

I am a person who spent 30 years in the church. And most of the things that I, that tell me that it's not a true thing, are stuff that I would have liked to know a lot earlier. Yeah. So it just is about nuance to me. Yeah. And sometimes, hold them. No, but it's really about people making their own decisions on how they will relate to the truth claims of the church, to at least know where they came from, what kind of scholarship has happened since then, and you know, make your decisions about your life accordingly. Love it. All right, let's dive in. All right, we're going to dive in. Um, John, do you want to start us off with, um, picking your first drink? Okay. It looks like the first one is like here on top. So let me just see here. Easy. Try and get it. There we go. All right, the first one is priesthood authority. And I think five of these are mine and five are yours. Yep. So I picked maybe the five top most important things the Mormon Church touts as sort of like the value proposition of Mormonism, like the top selling points. So I picked big ones. I didn't go with small ones. And, uh, shade. What is that? Throwing shade on my? Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I mean. No, you picked big ones, but I picked like, if the church would have put the church, for example, the church would never say polygamy is like its selling point. I picked like the top five things that the church would claim to be selling points, right? And those are the ones I'm going to address today. So priesthood authority is one of the things the church says they have over everyone. So according to Joseph Smith, this is the one true church, and it's the only church with exclusive priesthood authority. To what that means is no other church has God's permission to exist. They're all, uh, apart of the Great and Abominable Church, according to the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. All churches have corrupt creeds, according to Mormonism, and they don't have God's approval. It's like starting a McDonald's franchise, but you don't have a franchise license. Like that's how the Mormon Church views all other religions and churches. Christians, evangelicals, Catholics, all of them. But it's more than that. The Mormon Church, unlike other Christian churches, the Mormon Church doesn't even believe that if you're baptized Catholic or you're baptized Baptist or Lutheran, that the baptism even counts. It's actually what most people in the world are doing. They're playing church. They're sincere. They want it to count, but they don't have the authority, they don't have God's permission. So of course, Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu and Jewish rituals don't count. But even Christian rituals, like marriage, like baptism, like confirmation, don't count. That's what the church says. And along with that, things like the power to heal sickness is a priesthood power. The power to get sealed in the temple forever in the Mormon temples is a priesthood power. So you basically, you know, can't get to heaven with Heavenly Father without going through the Mormon Church, Mormon baptism, Mormon confirmation, Mormon endowment, Mormon marriage, Mormon sealings. That's what the church teaches. Now, I'm sure you're asking, what's wrong with that? What could possibly be wrong with that? We love exclusivity. We love a club. Yeah, I mean, and that hits on one of the problems. Like, I was in high school when I divided the number of Mormons in the world by the number of people in the world, and at the time it was like less than one half of 1%. And I think we've actually lost ground. I think the percentage of Mormons in the world is actually lower in 2024 than it was in 1985. Totally. So, uh, the problem's gotten worse. It's rude to tell all of the churches they don't count. It's rude to tell all other churches that their ordinances don't count. And I guess you could say, well, you know, that's God, so it's not not us, it's God. Is that really the type of God you want to believe in? We'll get to God later. Um, but we'll get to you later, Elohim and Jehovah. Um, but also, uh, in addition, it's, it's offensive. It's exclusive. And it just, like, why would a God, you know, we assume that God is loving. We assume that God cares about his children. Mormon, the Mormon Church teaches that the whole purpose of coming to this existence, that we existed as spirits before, and that we want to get back to live with God someday. And the whole purpose of this existence is to not just learn the lessons or whatever that we need to return to Heavenly Father and to show obedience, but to get the ordinances by proper priesthood authority. That's the whole ball game. That's why we're here. And yet, that whole, that second half of getting the critical ordinances, well, sorry, 99.99% of the world is going to go through this entire mortal experience and never get them. And then what? That leads, I think, to a point you're probably going to talk about the temple. Yeah. Like Mormons having to spend the rest of the millennium, a thousand years, doing temple work for dead people so that those baptisms and marriages that didn't happen while the 99.99% of God's children died without receiving them. Now Mormons are going to have to spend a thousand years doing those dead ordinances. None of that makes sense. And then even just the power to heal, like the Mormon Church believes that only Mormon men who have the priesthood have the power to heal people who are sick. But that means like a mother, a Catholic mother in Guatemala, who's trying to bless her child, has less power to heal her sick, dying child than some 12-year-old, prepubescent, acne-faced boy from Sandy, Utah. Like, why would God, why would God give that little boy in Sandy, Utah more power to heal a mother's sick child than the mother herself? And then if a Mormon's going to say, now, wait a minute, that mother still has power of prayer to heal her kid, then why is priesthood power needed at all? So for all those reasons, this whole priesthood authority thing seems like a flex. It seems like a franchise play. But for anyone who cares about fairness and a loving, all-powerful God who loves all of his children, none of it, none of it checks out in any way that's both logical and ethical, in my opinion. Wow. Well done. Mic drop on that. Is that okay? Yeah. I, I don't, I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just, I'm making this up. Yeah, he's making this up. Don't worry, Mormons are watching this. And none of that, you guys all have the priesthood, and it's all equal, but also it's a flex at the same time. There's no problem detected here. We could also spend a while just talking about priesthood authority versus women's roles in the church as well. Yeah, don't. Yeah, don't forget about the fact that like, literally half of God's children, the women, are completely excluded. I knew that you insinuated that from the Catholic mother role already. No, I, what a, I mean, there's so many other things, but like, isn't it like a male to totally forget the women? Like, not like you, John, you remembered to come today, so you're fine. No, but I mean, that's why would God give his most important power only to half of his children? Like, makes no sense. Well, the argument seems to go that that's what men needed to mature them, and women are already so awesome that they don't need it. I, a man told me it was benevolent sexism in a kind of mansplain way, but yeah, we've got all this power, so we'll tell you that we have the power because we need it, otherwise we won't be as good as you. But that's ridiculous. That's insulting. It's mansplaining, and it's, uh, it's disempowering. You know, it's unfair. Yeah. Why would God limit his most important power to just half of his children because of their body parts? Mmm. You know, and the 1995 Women's Conference and when the proclamation to the family was supposed to be coming out, and the First Presidency completely scrapped the women's General Presidency, scrapped their entire version of, you know, the Women's Conference that they were going to talk about diversity and inclusion of families, but they really needed to get that proclamation of the family out and said, ladies, I know you've been working on this, but we have a better idea, and it's called anti-exclusion of the families, and we need to announce this at your meeting. And the women had no say, they had no authority, they couldn't tell the prophet, "No, we've already worked on this for a year. This is what the Lord has called us to talk about." It's diversity of families. Prophet can come in and supersede even the highest levels of women in the church. So if I, people are like, go back to the church, you there's so much for you there. There's plenty of community, there's existential questions, there's a lot of stuff that just people will hang on to. But at the end of the day, I have more autonomy and power outside of this priesthood authority that is the proposition than I ever would within the church. The highest ranking woman in the church still has 116 men of priesthood authority that can outrank her. And what does that say about God? Like, as people like to say, the Mormon Relief Society is the largest organization in the world of women run by men, right? Asterisk. Although this podcast is run by a woman. This podcast is, we need new words for one-woman show because I'm a one-woman show. Producer monarchy? Monarchy? It's a mono-matriarchy. Can you put the word ho in there for branding reasons for me? Mono-matriarchal. All right. Is it my turn? Your turn. I really don't know where to go. And then if it doesn't fall, and we just keep building it, we can go back to it and be like, and another thing. It'll be an endless loop. Yeah. Uh, so mine is Book of Abraham. Oh, okay. That was one of yours. Um, the Book of Abraham, in my estimation, is probably the number one thing that is indisputable for the most amount of people that points to Joseph Smith is a proven fraud. We cannot negotiate this. Let me take you back to the early times of the church. Joseph Smith, he's a big shot prophet. People are like, he's our guy. He can translate scripture. And at this time, Egyptomania was really rear in its head. Napoleon was invading, and there's all these catacombs of Egypt that were suddenly being excavated for the first time. People were going crazy for it. And a man named Michael Chandler had these sarcophaguses and some different ancient Egyptian papyri that he was touting around Kirtland, Ohio. And the Saints at the time were like, our prophet can translate, you know, these ancient writings because nobody had cracked the code on what is Egyptian, how do we read it. They still had not discovered the Rosetta Stone yet. And so Joseph Smith takes one look at these papyri and he's like, "Oh my gosh, these are actually from the hand of Abraham. Abraham, the Abraham wrote all of this." So they gathered up some money and they were able to buy these papyri. And Joseph Smith is like, "No sweat, I'm going to translate this." He says, "This Egyptian symbol means this paragraph, and this Egyptian symbol means this." There's also the facsimiles of these other ancient drawings where Joseph's like, "Head of a jackal? That's just a regular guy." Completely gets the story incorrect. Basically, every Egyptologist alive thinks that Joseph Smith was basically, I don't know, off his rocker, smoking some wacky tobacky, if he thought that this was actually a translation of anything to do with anything that he said that is still in Mormon scripture to this day. I have the Book of Abraham sitting right behind me. In Mormonism, growing up, this entire unit of my childhood and seminary is learning these stories from the Book of Abraham. Turns out that what Joseph Smith translated them from doesn't have Abraham's name on it. Doesn't occur in the same time period. It is just some typical funerary text that you would expect would be buried with a mummy. And since then, the church has had to move the goalposts, basically, and say, when he said translate, what he meant was was a catalyst. It was just like an explosion of thought. Like he needed the book of, he needed to have those writings that had nothing to do with Abraham, but he created something completely different that didn't have anything to do with what it actually said in that. And, um, Mormonism is really staking its life to Joseph Smith is not a con man. But when you have something like the Book of Abraham, it's just indistinguishable from a fraud. When somebody's trying to play big shot prophet, those are the kinds of things that they do. That's when I heard that, I remember where I was reading that on the computer, July 12th, 2019. And said, okay. And then I still had the rest of the entire investigation of Mormon truth claims to go through. But that was the first thing that hit me. And I don't think a lot of people can come back from that place of indistinguishable from a fraud. Yeah. This one's near and dear to my heart because I didn't learn this stuff until I was 30 or 31 years old. So I was, you know, married with kids, working at Microsoft. And I was visiting my cousin, who is a doctor, Dr. Richard Parkinson. He lives in Orem. And he had left the church when I was really, really young. And I was always like, why isn't, why isn't Cousin Ricky Mormon? You know what I mean? And once I became an adult, and we would hang out with him and his wife, and his wife is still a believer, he's like, John, have you ever heard the story of the Book of Abraham and the papyri? And I'm like, no. But what do you have to teach me? You're not even an active member. And I've read the Book of Abraham way more than you, and I've, you know, taken all the lessons. Like, what do you have to teach me? He's like, well, let me tell you. And then he told me the story of the papyri that Joseph Smith supposedly used to translate the Book of Mormon, that they had been lost, but then they were found again in like the 1960s. And that Egyptologists translated them, and the word Abraham didn't even appear in the entire thing, let alone, you know, the stories that Joseph Smith created from it. So the shock wasn't just that Joseph Smith was exposed as a complete fraud, but that I had gone 30 years and had never been told this by my own church. And that was a one-two punch. I, there was still a lot I had to unravel, but this was definitely the first huge, you know, shoe to fall, so to speak, to my testimony. And it is one of many, many smoking guns, but it is absolutely lockstep, unassailable proof that Joseph Smith was a fraud. Right on. And the church admits it. I mean, the church does, it calls him a fraud, but if you read the church's Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham, you can go look it up. Just Google Gospel Topics Essays, Book of Abraham. The church uses apologetic, flowery, faithful language, but it says right there, the word Abraham doesn't even appear in the entire papyrus set. Right. So that's game, set, match. Yeah. And Carrie Molin, I always have to bring up as well, who's like one of maybe two people in the church who are Egyptologists. I don't think they're like renowned in their field. I think Robert Ritner was like, we don't respect the guy. They're, as I understand it, they're laughing stocks of the field, but they're at BYU and their job is to defend the church. So they'll sacrifice their reputation to defend the church. Yeah, you know, my favorite Carrie Molin quote of all time. Say it with me. I start out with an assumption that the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon and anything else that we get from the restored gospel is true. Therefore, any evidence I find, I will try and fit into that paradigm. Now, it's your turn. Is it my turn? All right. All right. Temple. That one's mine. That's you. Should I go again? Yeah, go for it. Continue with, uh, the priesthood authority thing. Um, about temple work. First of all, you know, yeah. First of all, what's wrong with temples? Like, they're beautiful, they're lit up, they're, you know, they're ask a bunch of Nevadan residents right now who have a balloon going in the sky. You can get married in them for eternity. They're nice, they're fun. What's wrong? That's what I thought until I actually went through. You know, you sing as a kid, "I'd love to see the temple, I'm going there someday." And you really set your sights on the temple as the highest achievement in Mormonism. You want to be worthy, live a life worthy to get your family sealed, to go through the temple, to take out the ordinances that you spoke of earlier. And until you actually kind of go through the temple endowment and actually see what it is for yourself, most people would not believe what actually happens inside Mormon temples. Famously, if somebody takes a video camera in, you know, for a like a hidden camera or something, those videos are completely shot down and disputed by any person who hasn't gone through the temple to say, "No, that's not my church." That's what I would have believed if I would have seen what actually happens inside Mormon temples with the different garb and the handshakes and the different chanting. I would have said, "That's not my church." That's unrecognizable from the Mormonism that I grew up in from the time I was a child till when I was 19 when I went through the temple. And so, um, I think that is done on purpose because the church, it's gotten these temple rituals from Joseph Smith that he said were never supposed to change. These were handed down as the most important ordinances for our salvation. That's washings and anointings, that's an endowment ceremony, these different handshakes that you learn to get into heaven. Um, the garments are never really supposed to be altered. Um, these different promises and things that are really God-breathed into this church because, as you spoke of before, about an apostasy and a restoration of these things, what are we really restoring if they're going to be so subject to change through the last, you know, 200 years that the church has been functioning, when there's pressure from the outside in and people saying, "We don't like pantomiming slitting our throats anymore. Maybe we could change that." So, um, going through the temple for me was a really big shock. I didn't really know what to expect. They kind of take you through temple prep classes and tell you that it's going to have a lot of symbolism and, "We're not a cult. Just go with it and just keep going back until you learn something from it." Um, but the first time I went through the temple, and every time that I tried to go back, uh, it was really hard for me to believe that God didn't care about my heart. He cared about handshakes. He cared about these different rituals. And this is the best use of my time for maybe two or three hours a week, as you're kind of supposed to go. I had a really hard time in the church believing that. And so, as I started to question more things, doing the research of where these temple rituals actually came from, and learning that Joseph Smith had just been, um, entered into Freemasonry, became a Freemason just about six weeks prior to introducing the temple ceremony to the Saints, was also a big shock because of all of the connections between the types of handshakes, the types of oaths, um, that just look completely plagiarized. And in my estimation, I just looked at it and said, "This is a guy who's starting a church. He wants to have some cool things, some things that will help bind his people together and keep some secrets about some polygamy and have some a type of marriage and sealing ceremony so that he could have more polygamist wives." And this is just spun out of control. How to control, how to control. And now, um, Mormons are so well known for these bright, beautiful, gaudy buildings off the side of highways that are lit up. But what's actually really going on inside of there is reminiscent of something that is, I think, really shameful and really detrimental to Mormonism's past, which is this Freemasonry and these connections with polygamy and so forth. But that's what I was supposed to be doing as a Mormon. And it really was hard to wrap my brain around that. So between all of that, and just, it just isn't a really good time to do it. It's not very fun. Most people have a lot of, you know, panic attacks and they feel really uncomfortable in these clothes. And it's really hard to feel connected to your maker in that setting. And then especially when there's like a $600,000 chandelier hanging over your head, just feels like the worst use of this hundred billion dollar church's corp, like their money, and the worst use of my time to do this work for us. And then the families that are going to apparently have to be sealed together, we're doing these proxy baptisms for, and the thousands of years that's, that's why the temple is a waste of time and money to me. And it's supposed to be everything. Yeah, yeah. So, well said. And, uh, just add kind of a me too. Like, I'll acknowledge that for Mormons, you know, Mormons are taught that the temple is the most sacred thing about Mormonism, basically. And that you're never supposed to talk about it. In fact, a husband can't even talk to his wife about the temple outside the temple, or a mom can't even talk to her daughter, or a dad can't even talk to his son or daughter about the temple, about what goes on in the temple, outside of the temple. That's how sacred, quote, or secret, the Mormon Church teaches its members the temple is. And I used to think that was because it was so sacred, but now, if you look back at all the changes the church has made to the temple, you realize that the reason why they kept it so secret is one, that's a holdover from the Masonic Lodge, because in the Masonic Lodge, you could literally allegedly be killed if you revealed the secrets of what was in the temple. But also, um, you know, other than the secrecy, it's just all the weirdness. If you, and the things that are culty or wrong. And so it is a, it is a matter of sort of, you know, processing your experience with the church to talk openly about things that you were conditioned to be afraid to ever talk about. So I think it's fair to talk about the temple once you don't believe in it anymore. And it's true, when I was going to the temple, I literally made motions of slitting my throat, just like that, ear to ear, slitting my throat. I made, I made motions of having my heart cut out. I made motions of being disemboweled. And those were all motions that the church taught me to use as penalties if I ever revealed what was, you know, done and said in the temple. Well, turns out that's all directly from the Masonic Lodge. So you can go Google signs and penalties and tokens, Masonic Lodge, and you'll see the throat slitting, you'll see the disemboweling. And like you said, I did it. This isn't just theoretical. I did this. Yeah. Um, and it was super weird. And I knew it was weird at the time, but all the Mormons will tell you, "You'll get it later. Keep going. Have faith. The more you go to the temple, you'll learn." And that was sort of a, that was sort of a technique of blame reversal, and of thought stopping. When really what I should have done is said, "That was freaking weird. That was violent. That was cultish. And I'm never going back." But instead, the thought stopping techniques kept me going for another long time. But you can also know how inappropriate or bad or evil the Mormon Temple ceremony is by what they took out. Because again, they took out the throat slitting. There used to be a preacher in the Mormon Temple ceremony that would denigrate all other religions other than the Mormon Church. They took out the preacher. Why? Women, you know, men used to covenant to God in the temple, but women had to covenant to their husbands. They took that out. Why? Because it was super sexist. Women used to have to veil their faces for almost 200 years. Women had to veil their faces where men didn't. They took that out. Why? Because it was sexist. But then again, like you said, if God gave the temple ceremony to Joseph Smith as a revelation, then why were they changing things? And not just changing things, changing the things that they were made fun of or criticized for, once the word got out of what was going on in the temple? Makes no sense. And then if you add to that the fact that the majority of stuff that goes on in the temple isn't like these sweet, innocent endowment ceremonies or washings and anointings, and by the way, I didn't even mention the fact that when I went through the temple, I had to wear the silk poncho where my entire sides were nakedly exposed. All I was wearing was a silk poncho that was open on the sides. And they would dip their finger in oil and touch me in private places when I'm like a 19-year-old kid about to go on my mission, literally touching me on my groin, touching me on my breast, nakedly, with this weird, creepy old guy. Why'd they take that out? Because it's creepy. It's better than when they were doing washings and anointings in a big bath of cinnamon whiskey. How they used to. My favorite, my number one favorite old-timey Mormon fact. Endowments or washings and anointings in baths of Fireball. Yeah. All right. But it was traumatizing for young Jellin. Yeah. Why'd they take it out? Because it was creepy and weird and abusive. And, you know, forget, forget the fact that there's no informed consent. So when somebody goes to the temple, they promise to give 10% of their income for their entire lives. They promise to live the law of chastity for their entire lives. They promise to spend all their time and money and resources to building up the Mormon Church, the law of sacrifice, the law of tithing, all these things. No loud laughter, no speaking ill of the Lord's anointed. Yeah. But, but, but the thing is, like, you're, you're 18 or 19 years old, you don't know what promises you're going to be making before you get in there. And then you get in there, and you're literally promising your life to the building up of the corporate Mormon church without any informed consent. So that's totally unethical and it's totally coercive when they're going in there believing it's going to be the most sacred experience of their entire life, and instead they're pressured to commit all 10% of their income and their entire lives to the church. That's unethical. So, and then, then the last thing, we've already talked about, like, most of the work that goes on in these temples is work for the dead. It's doing washings and anointings for dead people, getting baptized for dead people, because again, that 99.99% that I talked about who never were Mormon, well, all their temple work and baptisms and marriages have to be done for like, I don't know, 20 billion children of God over the existence of mankind. So, how ridiculous is it when there's poverty in the world, famine, illiteracy, lack of water, disease, that instead of like trying to make the world a better place with our billions of hundreds of billions of dollars in time and resources, Mormons, as like their biggest act of service to mankind, are going to these Mormon temples for two hours at a time and performing dead ordinances for dead people? Insane. What a huge waste of time and money. Time. Yeah. So, I know it's sensitive to talk so directly about something so quote sacred to Mormons, but it's effed up. And didn't they in the last conference change it so that people can, like, teens can get their endowments out like one year out of high school now, even they're not going on a mission? They have to do all that younger and younger to, because you want people making these lifetime commitments as young as possible, because once they get older, oh, they learn things. And oh, they learn about other churches. And oh, they develop critical thinking skills. Their brain isn't even fully developed until like 27 or 28. So you want to lock them in with eternal commitments when they're like 17 or 18. Yeah. So that's, that's more pressure, more undue influence, and it's unethical in my opinion. Right. And the last thing that I will just add that will tie everything together with the priesthood authority point is that the priesthood authority, that these are, you know, prophet, seers, and revelators, and this is where the answers kind of lie. And if you are doubting, you know, the truthfulness of any of this, just, you know, ignore those feelings within yourself, keep going with what you think is true, and keep believing in the church. But then, as you kind of pull the curtain back and see who's moving the levers around, and you realize that, like you said, in 1990, when those more violent oaths were taken out, that was done by a survey. You can read that survey online right now. Like, that is the most sacred ordinance that was never supposed to change. That was so violent, they were going to keep it forever and ever and ever, coming from down from God's mouth to Joseph Smith's ears to our chance. Like, and the fact that that was changed because they surveyed members in the church to say, "Why are you guys not attending the temple so much?" Is it, is it the blood oaths? And people are like, "Yeah." Uh, I guess they need surveys for those things, which is just good marketing. But God shouldn't need opinion surveys to administer his most sacred ordinances, right? Yeah. And it shouldn't change depending on public criticism. I mean, isn't that what why you have gods and prophets so you don't just make decisions based on public opinion? And that's the basis of the entire restoration. That's what I always try to say is the proposition of Mormonism has just, they've proven that it has failed. The way that they're aligning with like crosses and things that they would have never been okay with before. Like on Google Maps, there's crosses instead of the Angel Moroni now. And they're letting missionaries use their first name and wear ordinary clothes, invite people to Bible studies, go to worship services. They're trying to take back a lot of the language of this good Christ brand because Mormonism, just the proposition, has failed. That all of this stuff that would make us a peculiar and unique people, people know about Mormons now, and they're trying to kind of sneak in the door with, uh, an opposite of a rebrand is what I call it. Like, it's, it's proving that the proposition of what Mormonism is supposed to be has failed because they're aligning themselves with what they started in up in resistance to. But and every single time they're like, "Here's a hot take, you ready? Why would God in his one true church need a rebrand?" Add that to the Jenga set. I mean, that's the whole thing. Every single part of Joseph's theology evolving. Is he's like, "Wait a second, rebrand it." It's a, it's a remix. Yeah. All right, my turn to pick one. Yeah. Is it yours? Um, yeah, because you picked the temple one. Yeah. Okay. It's my turn. Personal revelation. Great. We have personal revelation in the church. Yeah. Like, what's wrong with that? Like, you get to talk to God yourself, or God can talk to you directly from the Holy Ghost. I mean, that's, I don't think that's a uniquely Mormon teaching, but I think Mormon, the Mormon Church would call personal revelation one of the most essential parts of its doctrine because when you, you know, meet with the missionaries and they teach you the missionary discussions and they have you read the Book of Mormon, they, uh, you know, they basically say, "Read the Book of Mormon, pray about it, ask God if this church is true, if the Book of Mormon is true, and then God will tell you, just like he told Joseph Smith through the Holy Ghost or some type of visitation, that this is the true church and the Book of Mormon is true." So what's wrong with that? Well, I'll tell you the problem is, is that, um, number one, uh, it didn't take me but 12 minutes to think this through in high school. All my friends were Baptists. Growing up in a Killeen, you know, Killeen, Texas, a Baptist town. And I would just go to them and say, "Hey, I know my church is true because the Holy Ghost told me my church is true." And so, checkmate, you guys should become Mormon. And they would just kind of look at me and pause and look at each other and say, "John, did you know that's impossible? Because we all prayed and we were told that the Killeen First Baptist Church is true, or the Lutheran Church is true, or the Catholic Church is true, or my random Pentecostal church is true." And then I was like, "Oh, wow, yeah, okay, wait a minute." Well, that must, you know, then in my Mormon brain, it's like, "Oh, well, God must have, Satan must have sent his deceiving angels to make you all think that God was telling you that your church is true when really it was Satan and his minions deceiving you to believe that your church is true." And then they would say the same thing back to me. So then I just realized, okay, wait a minute, how reliable is the Holy Ghost if the Holy Ghost appears, if there's no way to really, you know, test this out, your claims versus mine? But it gets more complicated than that because I remember, you want to hear one of the most, um, devastating things to my testimony in high school, Cara, are you ready? Yeah, I've heard it all, but hit me. Uh, you probably have. So I'm watching one of the Muppet movies. I was a huge Jim Henson fan. I'm watching a Muppet movie, and there's this really emotional climax at the end, and I start to like get tingling in my neck, and the hair stands up on my arms, and I start to get emotional, and tears well up in my eyes. And I think, "Oh my gosh, like I'm feeling what the church told me is the Holy Ghost." Because that's what I was taught the Holy Ghost is, those feelings that you feel when you're starting to get super emotional, a tingling, swelling of the breast, they called it burning of the bosom within Mormonism. That's how you know the Holy Ghost is telling you that something's true. And then I'm like, "Now, wait a minute, is the Holy Ghost literally telling me that this Muppet movie is true?" And then I'm like, "Okay, no, that's probably just my emotions where I'm just feeling emotionally touched or moved by the Muppet movie." And then I'm like, "Well, what if it's both? What if it's both the Holy Ghost and I'm feeling moved?" And then I just realized, how would you ever know the difference between just being genuinely moved by something and feeling emotional feelings and the Holy Ghost? There's literally no way for you not. Let alone there's no way for me and my Baptist friend to decide who had the legitimate Holy Ghost or not, but there's no way for me to know whether it's the Holy Ghost inspiring me or I'm just literally feeling good feelings that every human feels. So it starts there. It's completely unical and unverifiable and untestable and completely subjective. And that's just the beginning. Um, you know, another problem with personal revelation is I never received it. Like, I was always taught that if I read the Book of Mormon cover to cover and pray about it, and if I was worthy, that like Joseph Smith, the church would send the Holy Ghost to confirm to me that the Book of Mormon was true. So, you know, it's, I'm like 16, 17 years old, I'm like about to go on a, about to go through the temple, I'm about to go on a two-year mission. And I'm like, "God, I'm like 16, my girlfriend wants to sleep with me, I'm trying to be righteous and faithful, I got to go on that mission soon. I'll read the Book of Mormon cover to cover. It's not a great book, it's not a fun read, but God, I'll do it if you promise to tell me this church is true at the end." I do it. I'm faithful. Never tried alcohol, never tried tobacco. When my girlfriend wants me to, you know, do things, I'm like, "No, I can't. I'm Mormon. I'm faithful." So I read the Book of Mormon, kneel down, pray, and I get no answer. Literally get back into bed. I'm super depressed. I got back down on my knees again to pray, and I got no answer. And don't tell me it's because I wasn't being righteous. I was certainly more righteous by my understanding of what Mormon righteousness was than any of the other kids that I knew who were Mormon. And so it, you know, that personal revelation, it doesn't come unless you just convince yourself that you had some emotional experience and you decide to interpret that as a manifestation that the church is true. But that's no different than what the Catholics and the Baptists and the Muslims do. Yeah. Not to mention, thank you for sharing that story. I don't know if I actually heard that part, the Muppet. I don't know. Renee wanted to sleep with you? Oh my gosh, no, that wasn't Renee. Oh, some other rebound. Yeah. Um, but people always kind of try to slide in there with like, "I actually got no answer because God was saying, like, it's almost kind of disrespectful for you to even ask for an answer because I've already given you an answer and it's this fruit of the gospel." Or just, "No answer is sometimes to people like the answer." And then that's like indistinguishable again from

No God, no answer. But for so many morons saying, like, bearing testimony, and their testimony being, they'll literally be like, "And I prayed, and I got no answer." But then I realized that I knew it was true all along. And it's like, "That's a testimony-building moment. That's how I had to go. I had to, I had to accept that interpretation that I knew all along because I never got the witness." And then I had to go be a missionary for two years, telling people I knew the church was true when I didn't. So that's how I used my cognitive dissonance to justify basically telling people something that wasn't true. I must have believed it all along, so now I'll lie for two years to people.

But that's not, that's not even the biggest problem. The unverifiability, the unreliability, and the, you know, non-existence of genuine spiritual manifestation is not even the biggest problem. One of the biggest problems is when crazy people, oh, I'm glad they think their thoughts and feelings are from God when really they're crazy. So, like, I, you know, I have a PhD in clinical and counseling psychology. There are things called delusions of grandeur. There are, you know, there are people who have histrionics. There are people who have schizophrenia, and there are just narcissistic people that want to shape the world to their own devices. So if you teach people that every thought or feeling that comes into their brain is possibly God communicating with them, well, you get Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow, who kill their spouses and or kids. You get Tim Ballard that believes that that he can, you know, abuse women, as I understand it, under the guise of saving children. You get, uh, Jody Hildebrandt, and, uh, and Ruby Franke, who are torturing Ruby Franke's children in their basement because they think God is endorsing it. And, and it's worse than that. You get the Lafferty brothers killing, you know, people. So this teaching of personal, personal revelation is not only unreliable and non-existent, it can be very dangerous and deadly. No one should be taught that they communicate with God.

Yeah, um, and that, and that God speaks to them. I, I literally believe, I'm a believer in free speech, with the exception of anyone being able to claim that they are a spokesperson for God, because that's too much power, and it's too dangerous. Too many things can go awry, as we've seen through, insert news story of the last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've covered all of that. Jody Hant stuff extensively on Mormon Stories, and things to do with visions of glory. And all Mormonism is just kind of this breeding ground for people to have their own DIY, you know, take the franchise model of all these different pieces and then make people believe something that will be part of their salvation for the rest of their life, you know? And then have murders and all kinds of horrible things be committed in the name of their own personal revelation.

Yeah, and we're just talking about the most extreme stuff. Like, what about a husband who's the patriarch in the home, just telling his wife to be quiet and do what he says because the Holy Ghost told him so? You know what I mean? Like they're also, or somebody who, you know, reads Joseph Smith's history, sees that Joseph Smith was caught with 14-year-old girls, and all of a sudden receives personal revelation from the Holy Ghost that he's supposed to hit up on a 14-year-old. Like, if Joseph can receive revelation from God that he should sleep with 14 or 16-year-olds, why can't some other Mormon man receive that same revelation? And they do. And that's what Warren Jeffs was right. So, like, they surely do. We got to kill this idea of personal revelation. It just, it's damaging, and it doesn't exist. It's unreliable.

Another reason why personal revelation is not a big fan is, you know, people can get personal revelation that I should be called as, like, a Sunday school teacher, and that's not a good idea. But more importantly, people are being called as Bishops and different roles when they had a history of, you know, sex abuse inspired by God. They're like, "Yeah, I definitely was I meant to call that guy who turned out to be a child molester. That's exactly what was supposed to happen." And, uh, the church completely runs on way too much personal revelation and not enough really checks and balances, unfortunately. Yeah. All right, your turn to pick. All right, let's Jenga. Shall we? Jenga. I did. Joseph's treasure digging.

So the entire proposition of the church is this restoration of a one true church. This book, The Book of Mormon, the Keystone of our religion, started with all of this history of Joseph Smith in his day being a treasure digger. 18 different treasure digs that he went out, put a rock into a hat, claiming that he could see buried treasure underground on farmers' land. And even if the treasure was never found, which it never was, the farmers would still pay. The farmers would still have to pay Joseph Smith money, and he'd be like, "Whoopsie, about that treasure. Hand over the cash." And for a church that's entire foundations are started in, like, you know, "everything else is an abomination, God's going to restore the one true church," that proposition completely is exploded on its face when we look at Joseph's treasure digging.

Of an illegal practice of this glass looking, this scrying, that he was found guilty in a court, was on trial, and found guilty of doing this illegal, disreputable practice. For the founder of Mormonism to start with doing something that is a fraudulent practice in and of itself, doesn't matter if Mormon apologists today, they want to say that, well, if he was a sincere believer in it, then he's not a fraud. But I don't want to go through the entire retelling of Joseph's treasure digging. But people in the church need to remember that it doesn't matter if you know Joseph Smith was a sincere believer in this, like, Christian mysticism, this Christian occult practice of this treasure digging. The fact is that Mormons themselves, you guys, you guys don't believe that that's an actual, you know, believable practice of how to find things within the earth. You know, that's not a believable practice to put rocks into hats and say, "Yep, that God's making the words appear here on this rock. Write it down. This is the most holy scripture of all time." You know, that that's not how your God would actually bring you the most correct scripture on Earth through the same mechanism that Joseph Smith was doing these illegal treasure digs in that he didn't find anything with.

So I, I really get annoyed on this one more than anything because I wish I would have known this growing up. I wish I would have known how the Book of Mormon was actually translated through this method, the same disreputable folk magic method of the rock in the hat. I wish I would have known that instead of being told my entire life that, no, you, you got the golden plates out of the hill, and he ran his fingers over it, and, you know, we couldn't really see them because they were behind a curtain, you know? To find out that the golden plates, they were never even in the room. And this is Joseph felt more comfortable putting his head into this hat and dictating the words off of the stone to his scribes to get this book. I wish I would have known that because to know that makes you wonder, where did he get the stone? He got it from a witch. So he must have believed in these types of occult practices to think that he could see something off of the stone that he got from his witch friend, Sally Chase. And to be involved in this so heavily as, as he was before he started Mormonism, really goes into another rebrand of Joseph's talents once he wanted to marry Emma, and his father-in-law said, "You are not a good dude. Get out of here. I thought you were legit. Turns out you're a fraud." And he goes back home and he's like, "Yeah, I guess I'll get a new job." Uses the same method to start a whole religion. And apparently nobody's asking questions. I got some questions about that.

But the one point I never want Mormons to miss that drives me insane because I, when I did the, uh, response video to Mormons, like pro-LDS YouTubers and stuff who were responding to Johnny Harris, they have such a, they have such a problem with like, "Oh, you know, you guys are making this look like it's a big deal. It's, it's Christian mysticism. It's Christian occult kind of practices." It's like, it really doesn't matter what you think and reinterpret it as. You don't believe that that's a way to find revelations from God. The church certainly doesn't believe that today. They have the rock. They don't use it for revelations. We, Occam's Razor, can obviously tell this is a fraud doing fraud things. Yeah, yeah, super well said. It's not, I go on, I'm like, this, you, you think in terms of bullet points and expand. I think in terms of, have you thought about this? But what about that? We need, we need all approaches. No, I mean, I think I love that you invoked Occam's Razor. Like, normally, people or institutions don't hide things unless they're problems. So unless they're lying, you know, or unless they've done something bad. So why, if, if the story of Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon with the seer stone from a rock in a hat that he used for treasure digging, if, if that were a great story, the church would have told it from the beginning. But instead, they hid that story and lied to us about it for almost 200 years. Why? Because it's a problem. Why is it a problem? Because that same rock in a hat that he, uh, you know, now we know used to allegedly translate the Book of Mormon, he, he used to do illegal fraudulent activity, which was, like you said, breaking the law by trying to convince people that he could find buried treasure when he couldn't.

And mentioning Isaac Hale is like the perfect way to back into this because, you know, fathers-in-law, you know, Emma's dad. There's one thing that Isaac Hale cared about most, and that's that his daughter would marry a great guy. And so Joseph Smith rolls into town with his dad, starts treasure digging with Josiah Stowell. Uh, you know, Joseph Smith lives with Isaac Hale, Emma's dad. So Isaac Hale is able to see Joseph firsthand. And Isaac Hale goes with Joseph Smith on these treasure digs to find a silver mine, which is, you know, Stowell. And he leads people to this point and says, "Dig, dig, dig here. Dig. Oh, you're almost there. You're almost there." And then right as they're about to get the treasure that everybody wants, that they're all paying for, Joseph's getting paid to find the buried treasure, all of a sudden Joseph goes, "Oh, sorry, this spirit took it away. It's disappeared. It's gone farther, deeper. Sorry, you didn't kill the chicken, right? Or you didn't, you know, draw the pentagram right, or whatever it was." Like, that's, that's fraud. That's a charlatan right there.

Why would God, you know, there, there's two probabilities you can ask yourself. Either, you know, um, God, either Joseph was a charlatan and the Book of Mormon and the Mormon Church isn't true, or God would choose a known charlatan and fraudster, uh, whose father-in-law didn't even think, you know, was worthy of his own daughter, that God would choose that person to start his one true church. And it's, you know, it would be one thing if, if the treasure digging fraud was everything. But when you add to the treasure digging fraud the problems of the Book of Mormon, the problems of the Book of Abraham, Joseph sleeping with 14-year-old girls, Joseph marrying over 30 women, not telling Emma about it, Joseph lying, the financial fraud, all the problems. It's just, why would, why would God pick such a problematic person to, to lead his one true church? It makes no sense to me.

Yeah, I mean, if the farthest reaches of the most progressive Mormons are like, "He was some kind of conduit for something or other, and he was making up stuff as he went, and he just was a very spiritual guy." I think, like, the farthest reaches of, like, the most that I can understand, like when Quo was sitting down here, of where you're coming from, when people still want to be able to nuance all of those problems away and still think of Joseph Smith as somebody special to look up to and stay in this church. It just begs the question, can you not just say, "Okay, he did all of that stuff," and then just nuance the things that came out of it? Like, you, like we talked about at the beginning, having a looser relationship with the things that he taught that are absolutes that you have to do. Great summation, John. Joseph Smith's treasure digging is one of my absolute favorite videos, and I always point people back to the three-hour video that I did responding to Hannah Stoddard on Word Radio. And she actually believes that Joe Smith was not a treasure digger, never once, never touched it, because that is satanic occult stuff, not him, not my prophet. And so it's really interesting. My, my biggest fascination, as you know, since our Rod Meldrum interview, is just the different lanes within Mormons now that the mainstream church admits such. Joseph Smith was doing this practice, and they're kind of inoculating people these days about, "Oh yeah, if you hear something about a rock and a hat, no biggie." So it's, it's a very different narrative than the one that you and I were raised on of how Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon and what his activities were like. Just a good Christian boy searching for the one true church, never touched a shovel. But I, I think it is very fascinating and interesting as the advent of the internet, where people are kind of have to go in one lane or the other. There's the traditionalist camp, Hannah Stoddard, Rod Meldrum, Tim Ballard, people like, I mean, half of Word Radio, basically, who would say that, no, that's actually an anti-Mormon lie that is infested from the historians departments of the church to even tell us that Joseph Smith did anything with this practice. Richard Bushman, he works for Satan. So I think that's one of the most interesting debates is what, you know, the traditionalist narrative is saying versus what the historical record shows. And the historical record shows, Occam's Razor, all day, fraud. Yeah. All right. Is it your turn? And another thing. One, one of my favorite quotes I got from the Joseph Smith Papers project with Joseph Smith's Uncle Jesse Smith. Uncle Jesse did not hold back one iota, writing letters to Joseph Smith saying, "I know you can't see anything in the ground. You say you can see things that you cannot see. Before he even really started the Mormon church, just saying, do not go looking out for these treasures. Can't do this. You're being a fraud. You're making our family embarrassed, and you're going to hell for it." So in addition to like Isaac Hale having a vested interest in who his daughter married, other family members of Joseph Smith too were like, "Think twice, John." We are halfway through. Yeah. Down five to go. To go. Which is the perfect opportunity to remember to plug my Greece trip coming up. Taking a Greece trip to Greece, August 26th. You're invited. Seven days. Sounds like a blast. Santorini. You should go. Yeah. If you don't go, you're worse than anything I can think of. Is that, did I go over the top? Was that too much? I understand people, it's economically might be difficult for some. But if you can afford it, John, would you say that your job overall is hard? Yes. Would you say that when I was around for the most part, just traveling, you know, going to funerals or going out for speeches, would you say that made the less enjoyable parts of life funner? From just me being around. Cara made Mormon Stories so much more fun in so many ways. Absolutely. I will give you your check after. But seriously, I think I have a good time. If you go, Cara, you're dumb. Okay. No, you'll have a great time if you go with Cara to Greece. Who wouldn't want to go with you to Greece? Have you been? I've never been to Greece, but I love Greek food. Yeah, I love Aristotle and Plato and Socrates. Or is it Socrates? Definitely not. All right, your turn to choose. Is it your turn? No. Yes. I'll do it. I don't care. We'll fail. We'll fail. The Godhead. The Godhead. So am I supposed to put that down? Yep. All right. The Godhead. Now, you're probably thinking Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. What's not to love about that, right? Creator of the universe. They did clear up some. I think it's easier to think of three separate instead of three and one. God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost being the same thing. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's the one of the big gripes between Christians. And I mean, that's how the church, that's how the Mormon Church sells it. It's like, all the other churches are corrupt. They don't understand even God and Jesus, you know? All other Christians believe that God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost are one. Otherwise, there's, you know, multiple gods. But, you know, Joseph Smith said, uh-uh-uh. I've talked to God and Jesus. I felt the Holy Ghost. They're all separate beings. Literally, God has a body according to Mormonism. Heavenly Father, Elohim, he's named in Mormonism, has a body of flesh and bones. In other words, the creator of the universe has 10 fingers, 10 toes, a colon, a pancreas, uh, you know, um, genitals, U, digestive system. Literally, in Mormonism, the creator of all, the most powerful thing in all existence, has a spleen. Uh, and it's, it's somehow used like eyelids, like he blinks. He can't see because that's how eyelids work. Like, that's the beginning. And then again, literally, in Mormon theology, Jesus is the literal Son of God, which means in Mormon theology that God, Elohim, the Father, impregnated Mary, this 14-year-old girl, impregnated her. And the the baby that came out of Mary, Jesus, is the physical son of Heavenly Father, God's celestial sperm, and Mary's terrestrial eggs. Like, we're not joking here. We're talking like Greek mythology, gods having sex with other things and offspring. Like, that's the beginning of Mormon theology.

Do you have a question? Quick question. And I'm not making this up, by the way. Is this guy, like, by chance, white? Yeah, of course. Is there anything? No, no, no. Yeah, he's white. He's male. Like, yeah. What? Why were you just saying it's patriarchy again? I just think it's always interesting because in my sphere of just growing up in a like very white Caucasian Mormon area in Provo, Utah, my entire life, being taught that when I want to aspire to be like Jesus, like God, and that one day that I will have a perfected body like that, it's always done in this idea that your, you know, everyone else's skin will get lighter, and that the standard of what God is is a white man, right? Like, when he appears to Joseph Smith in the, uh, sacred grove, he's always described as being like a white, white man. Yeah. Isn't it a little convenient that when people produced the idea of a God that they visited, that God happens to look almost exactly like them? Like Joseph Smith, white, male, blue eyes, whatever, white skin, God happens to look a lot like Joseph Smith, and not like his wife. A totally separate topic. Taylor Swift is my God in this sphere. So you really legitimate. You, it's legitimate. Thank you. Um, yeah, you just really made me realize that, you know, my own personal aspirations, I mean, or whatever I focus on, I mean, I'd say you and Tay Tay are pretty much indistinguishable. Thank you. I've always wanted you to say that. Yeah, it's true. Where else were you going? Yeah.

So, so there's so many, you know, Mormons hold this as a value proposition that that God's a God, Jesus is a God, and that we can all become Gods too, and that we're literal offspring of God and Heavenly Mother or Heavenly Mothers. But there are problems with this. Like, anatomically, does God use his sphincter? Does God use his, when God, does God use his mouth and tongue? What does God experience the digestive system? Why does he? I was thinking a little more dirty. I was thinking a little more procreation. Does God use his penis? Yes. Why else would he have? Literally, why would Heavenly Father have a celestial penis if he didn't use it? So does God get erect? Yes, because he's got a body just like ours. Like, again, does God blink? When he blinks, can he not see? Does that mean the whole universe is in danger when God blinks because he misses something? But then if he can see everything, why does he need eyebrows, eyelashes? Like, it makes no sense. God doesn't need to eat food to exist, but then why does he have a digestive track? So, like, at the beginning, at the start, it makes no sense. In addition to being sort of like sexist and racist, because God's white, God's not black, God's not brown, God's not whatever else. Mormon God is a white, bearded, white-skinned male God. So that's a problem. But it's worse because, you know, if Jesus is the Son of God, and you know, Mormons are taught that, you know, we're evil by nature, that humans are at their core evil, that they're going to sin and do bad things, and that God, even though he's the creator of all, brilliant, all-powerful, he could not come up with a way to make that fact okay, that all his children were going to do horrible things and sin. So the only solution that God could come up with to solve the sin problem of all his children sinning is to take his only sinless child, Jesus, and torture and kill him. And that's Mormon theology. That Jesus, God allowed Jesus, did plan, planned for before the world existed, God planned that his perfect son would come to the earth and be literally tortured, beaten, and killed, hung on a cross, and tortured and killed. And that was the plus suffer in the Garden of Gethsemane, according to Mormonism, bleeding from every pore for all the sins of all humankind who have ever lived or will ever live. That's the only solution God could come up with to solve the sin problem of the children he created. How is that humane? How is that in any way smart? How is that in any way creative? How is that in any way ethical to torture one of his own children to fix the problem of his own creation, which is that all of us sin? It's a horrible idea. If I did this to my kid, if it's like, "Hey, you know, hey, child number one, you're the good child, and the other four children are rotten, so I'm going to beat and punish you to make up for the sins of your siblings," that would make, and kill you, by the way, that I would be, I would be put to death, right? And yet, when God does that, it's this beautiful, inspiring story of sacrifice. And it's really barbaric if you think about it. And I know I'm talking about one of the most sacred parts of Mormonism, which is the atonement of Jesus Christ. But think about it. Am I wrong? Does this, is there anything that I said that isn't at least, uh, logically an outflow of core essential Mormon doctrine and theology?

Yeah, because of the simple fact that, like me as a human being on Earth, if I forgive somebody who's done something horrible on Earth, you have to forgive them. In Mormonism, there's scriptures that say like, um, "I will forgive who I will forgive," God says. But up to you, you forgive everybody, no matter what they've done. And if I can actually, out of the goodness of my heart, forgive you, John, for absolutely nothing, because you've been perfect, except for not coming on my Greece trip, if I can forgive you, and it doesn't take any additional violence, I'm more ethical and more just than God. Yeah, in that right alone. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then when you add to it, you know, again, Mormons are going to say the atonement theology is, is amazing, that Jesus suffers for our sins and that he loves us. But like, why, if God created us to sin in the first place, if he made all of us imperfect, and humanity can really be, I don't know, a show in terms of all the ways we make mistakes, why would God, you know, make it so us acting the way he created us to act, which is sinful and imperfect, could keep us from living with him forever? He could just say, "How about this? I'll create you all. You'll go down and live your lives. You'll make mistakes. You'll learn. You'll try to do better. And then when you're done, you all come back to live with me." But no, he says, "If you make mistakes, I've made, I've created you to make mistakes. So when you go down and fulfill the measure of your creation, which is to make mistakes and to sin, I would say even stronger than that, it's that you're told from the time you're born that you live in opposition to righteousness, that like your existence is, yeah, that you are an enemy of God from the time you were born in Mormon doctrine." In the Book of Mormon, "the natural man is an enemy of God and has been since the beginning of the earth." You're born in like a rebellion to God. Yeah, you're primed to be evil. So, yeah, you're primed to be, you know, have only the enticings of the spirit, hopefully get you to go on God's path. But, yeah, keep going with.

Yeah, so like instead of just saying, "Hey, you're gonna, you're gonna make mistakes, you'll mess up, you'll come down to earth, you'll learn from them, and then when you're done, you'll die and you'll come back and live with me," God's like, "Nope, nope. I created you to make mistakes. But when you do, if you don't pay 10% of your income to the Mormon Church, go do weird temple ordinances in the Mormon Church where you slit your throat or whatever, spend two years on your mission, get married in the temple, spend your life building up a 200-plus billion dollar corporation, unless you do all that, you don't get to come live with me in the hereafter. And I'm going to literally keep you out of my presence, not just Cara, not just for a weekend, not just for a couple years, not just for a hundred years. If you don't pass all those tests by a certain deadline, you literally are withheld from your parents, your father's holy presence for eternity. Eternity." That's the best that all-loving, all-powerful God could come up with. It's ridiculous. So when you really poke holes in or you dig deep or scratch the surface of the Mormon Godhead, it's ridiculous. It's unethical. It's barbaric. Great. I love all of the rant that you just went on because when you told me what your list was, I was thinking more in terms of like the theology of the development from like the First Vision and the multiple accounts of the First Vision and no, all of the ways that I was supposed to believe in this church, that God is, you know, this man of flesh and bone, these separate, all these things that are so new and revelatory that Joseph Smith came up with. To find out that his, his own theology of who God was was developing with The Book of Mormon, with the First Vision accounts that match up perfectly, um, yeah, with with diverting from a Trinitarian view to the Mormon, the Godhead, right? Now, so that always was a, a big sticking point when I was kind of deconstructing that. I, that the proposition of the church is all of those things that they know who God is, but even Joseph Smith from the inception of the church, he didn't know who God was. Yeah. If God, if Joseph Smith is seeing God face to face, and yet it, he changes his story of who he saw, what, what happened at the event, and it goes from one being, the Lord, to, you know, 12 years later or whatever, God and Jesus. And again, all of that is told like, you know, 18 years after it actually happened. Like, uh, and there's no contemporary stories of him telling anyone that it happened. It's just a really sketchy story to begin with. So Mormon Godhead, not a strength. Not a strength. Well said, John. All right, I'm going to pick the next one. All right, this one's yours. The Book of Mormon. Sorry, it's mine again, huh? The Keystone of the religion. Well, or is it the Keystone? I think I'm going to address that. Keeping up the entire arch. I'm going to address that. Actually, missionaries go door-to-door. This is the most correct book on Earth. Another Testament of Jesus Christ. This is straight from the ancient prophets to our modern day. Yay, we have new scripture. What's wrong with that, John? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, where do I begin? So you're right, the Mormon Church teaches that the, that the Book of Mormon is the most correct book on the planet, um, in spite of the fact that it's been changed thousands of times and has been demonstrated by science to be, um, a, a work of fiction. Like you like to say, a 19th-century work of Bible fan fiction. You like to call it a Rocky Mountain, the Rocky Mountain Bible fan fiction sex cult shirts are available. March, March merch. Okay, continue. Um, yeah, so like, the Book of Mormon is supposed to be the most correct book ever. It's not. But, uh, you know, that's just the beginning. The Mormon Church teaches that the Book of Mormon is the Keystone of the religion, and like you said, if there's an arch and the Keystone keeps the arch together, you pull away the Keystone, the arch crumbles. Now, it's absolutely true that the Book of Mormon in 2024 has been shown by scientists to be completely, uh, a work of, of 19th-century fiction. There's horses in the Book of Mormon that shouldn't be there for the time period it's covering in America. There's, there's sheep, there's cattle, there's wheat. Like, none of that stuff existed during the Lamanite and Nephite time that the Book of Mormon claims in America. Um, there's swords, metal swords, steel swords, there's shields. There's, there's millions of people's people that are supposed to have lived and had these battles where millions of people died. There's just, you know, there's a Christian theology there that that literally before Jesus was born, Native Americans were baptizing each other in the name of Jesus. Makes zero sense. The linguistics aren't there. The geography, there's not even a Mormon alive today that can actually tell you on what geography The Book of Mormon reliably took place. Like it's a, as opposed to like the Bible, at least where we know Jerusalem, Jerusalem, yeah. Um, so the Book of Mormon is a scientific show. I, it's a blasphemous thing to say, but there's zero scientific or historical credibility, negative credibility, because there's all these acronis, anachronisms that that disprove the church. And then, you know, but that's not even the biggest problem with the Book of Mormon, because I want to guess your mind, the biggest problem is the racism. Continue where you're no, no, no, that's it. That's a huge one. That's where I was going next. So you did, you did nail it. But the Book of Mormon starts with this narrative that, you know, these brothers were fighting, Laman and Lemuel and Nephi, and they kind of split into two groups. And then God has this great idea. This God that we just talked about of the Godhead, Mormon God, all-powerful God, all-loving Mormon God, says, "Hmm, what do I do? I've got these two factions, the good ones and the bad ones. I've got to find some way to deal with this situation. I know, alter the skin of the bad, you know, Nephites and Lamanites. I'll turn their skin black. White. Am I going to turn their skin black because I want all those people to be loathsome, according to the Book of Mormon, to be dark and loathsome and unattractive to the white, um, you know, Nephites and and Native Americans?" And so literally, it doesn't just, doesn't just say that dark skin is bad, doesn't just curse them for their wickedness with dark skin, but he says it's because he wants to make them ugly. So God believes dark skin is ugly and loathsome, and that's a super racist teaching, and that's the foundation of the Book of Mormon. The rest of the Book of Mormon, this happens like in the first several pages, and then from then on, you've got this book where the dark-skinned, bad savages are fighting the light-skinned, white righteous. And sometimes it switches back and forth, but, you know, that's how the book ends, that the evil, wicked, dark-skinned Native Americans kill off all the white-skinned, good, righteous Native Americans. And that's why when, when, when Europeans came to settle North America and Central and South America, they found these quote dark-skinned savages. That is literally the core narrative of the Book of Mormon, and it's super racist and historically inaccurate and insulting. And it, it makes the Mormon God even worse, if you can imagine that. Well said, John. Yeah, and I'll just add one last thing. It's like, it's deception for the Mormon Church to say that the Book of Mormon is the Keystone of the religion because truthfully, if the, it's true that if the Book of Mormon is a fraud, the Mormon Church is a fraud. But I would say Joseph Smith is the Keystone of the Mormon religion. If Joseph Smith is a fraud, the entire Mormon religion falls. Because the truth is, everything else rests on Joseph. So if Joseph didn't have the First Vision that he claimed, then the Mormon Church is a fraud. If the Book of Abraham that Joseph Smith produced is a fraud, then Mormonism falls. Same with the Book of Mormon, same with the Doctrine and Covenants, same with the priesthood that we've already talked about, same with the, everything. So, yeah, if Joseph Smith isn't true, the Jenga tower falls in of itself. What they, I think one of the reasons why they claim that the Book of Mormon is a keystone is because they, you can read it and read these stories and they're talking about Jesus and Jesus loving people, or or Nephi being courageous and other people being bad, and, you know, righteous soldiers winning their battles and killing all the dark-skinned Nephites. If it makes you feel good inside, those warm fuzzies that I talked about during the personal revelation section, The Book of Mormon has a shot. If you read it long enough and are told for a long enough time that it's God's one true scripture on the earth that's unadulterated and pure, if you're told that as a child for long enough, then if you have a warm fuzzy experience reading it, the church is like, "A duck out of June bug, see? That means the church is true. You had that emotional experience. Checkmate. Convert to the church. The church is true because you, you felt warm fuzzies when you were reading the book." And that's why they want to say that the Book of Mormon is the Keystone of the religion because it maybe more than a lot of other things can get you to feel those warm fuzzy things that the church can then convince you to interpret as meaning that the Mormon Church is true. Yeah. Right on. Yeah. And all I'll say to end that is I read the Book of Mormon as a teenager, young adult, and stuff, and I only really connected with like the Bible and, you know, more modern works that I could understand and stuff. But the Book of Mormon was the hardest for me to gain a testimony of. I can still say that I never really gained a strong testimony of the Book of Mormon besides like certain passages that I thought were profound or something. But I still was not really able to, besides all of like the history and all the things you just mentioned of why it doesn't make sense, I think for the actual average reader, the Jesus Christ that's even described there, that the missionaries would knock on your door and say like, "Hey, there's lost sheep that God didn't just, you know, bring his word to people once, he also flew over to the Americas to, you know, minister to his people over there." Isn't aren't they so lucky? It's like, first of all, there's lots of other civilizations that he missed out on. He only went to like one out of hundreds of thousands at any time in history. But second of all, they're lucky that he didn't go because he, yeah, dropped mountains and tornadoes and earthquakes on all the people who were not super on board with everything that he was putting down. Yeah, so count yourself lucky that he didn't go visit them. And what's worse is for Mormons, the God that Joseph Smith talks to is Jehovah. The God that any prophet talks to is Jehovah. So it's not even God the Father that's the genocidal maniac. Mormonism is somehow managed to turn the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, who becomes Jehovah. They managed to turn him into a genocidal maniac. How do you turn? It takes a special brand of theology to turn the Prince of Peace into a genocidal maniac. That's a really good point. Somehow Mormonism's done it. Yeah, because that's a little known fact I remember from seminary, but I don't think most people realize this, that in Mormonism, whenever God is talking, it is only to introduce his son. Yes. It's only to say, "This is my beloved son," or something. So he has like four lines in all of Mormon history ever. It is always, if God is saying something, Old Testament God, anything, it is Jehovah who is the God of this world who is saying it. And that's such a funny point that, yeah, it takes a really special brand of Christianity to go turn, yeah, this homeless preaching rabbi into a genocidal maniac. Like, when Mormon Jesus is appearing to the Nephites and the Lamanites, he's all-powerful, right? Yeah. I mean, he rose from the dead and he's appearing to all these people. Is he not watching the volcanoes erupt and drop on people's heads and burn people alive? He's watching it. He could stop it. He's the one causing it. Yeah. And yet he's cool with it. Like, and he doesn't even apologize. It's not like, "Behold, I am the Lord. Sorry for killing all your friends and family." He's just like, "Hey, it's me. I'm here. Yeah, let's talk about it." Like, sorry for all the people that died because I appeared. Yeah, it's just crazy. What an entrance. What an entrance. Really, really. It's like he's more of a diva. Mormon Jesus is more of a diva than Beyonce. Right on. Yeah. More of a diva than actually your new reference you need to use is, uh, Mormon is more of, no, of a diva than Jennifer Lopez. No, if you were following Jennifer Lopez's TikTok right now, I'm telling you. Stop. On Jennifer Lopez is the only diva name you ever need to hear. You're too young to know Barbra Streisand. Um, I'm not too young to be compared to her with my nose and know the effects of her. Okay. Nope. You gotta do it on your own. No way. Let it wobble. It can't wobble because if it falls, we can't do the final ones. You didn't think this through. No, I did. What if it falls? We then create a. We don't know what the last ones are. We create an ex-Jenga.

player podcast where we just talk about all of these things that are on the floor and why they couldn't withstand being held in a tower, blah blah blah. Okay, this is yours. This is yours. Racism. All right, as the, um, person with the most faked hand right now, let me go ahead and handle racism between us two white people. I mean, we did kind of talk about it. Um, we talked about the racism of the Book of Mormon. One thing, um, that I think I'm, I always try to think of things in terms of what might people not be putting together. Like you said, with the Book of Mormon, it's not just what the Book of Mormon says, it's also what it doesn't say. So when God has an opportunity to set the record straight on why people have different colored skin, for instance, whether African descent or Native Americans, the Mormon God, as Joseph Smith revealed it, and then through the subsequent prophets, all the way into just barely maybe these kinds of theories being disavowed with the Gospel Topics Essays, for all of the subsequent prophets to only double down on the racist ideals of the day, um, really speaks a lot to what, just what Mormonism has the potential to, uh, kind of codify, has the potential to instill and brainwash into people these racist ideas, to double them down, to tell them that they're God-breathed, that these are ordained since the beginning of time, instead of saying, no, these are incorrect principles that are the corruptions of our modern day, instead of what, what, what Mormonism could be, could be so much more beautiful, but instead, they, they choose to continually double down.

So, in out of the four revealed scriptures that Joseph Smith made between the Book of Mormon, Book of Moses, Book of Abraham, and DNC, why every single one of them has some type of either the curse of Cain, or like in the Book of Mormon, skin color is a curse, a literal curse from God for disobedience. Yeah. And so, yeah, between, you know, just the history of our nation and what saying certain people's skin color makes their, you know, worth and value before God, and how people are able to treat them and enslave them, and like murdering the Tonkawa tribe with, with Brigham Young, at every turn, Mormonism, instead of doing something that is countercultural, um, they were doing the thing that you would expect of that time period, which is utilizing these types of racist ideas. So, I mean, we could talk about Mormon racism continually, but, um, the question that's kind of been on people's minds, I have a whole video that I've written that I will go over. It's a Jeopardy game that I've made, John, about, is the Book of Mormon racist? Uh, because there's just been a lot of reinterpretations of the skin color doesn't really mean skin and so forth. Um, but everything, I think, just simply put, everything that Mormons want to turn to, they have to renegotiate, uh, the actual intent as Joseph Smith and the prophets wrote it, and how it was preached for so long, only because of modern sensibilities around racism. The racism that people that you have interviewed, and, you know, people of color friends of mine who have actually experienced what it's like to actually modern-day grow up in this church that has so many of these doctrines and policies around what dark skin actually means for people who are Polynesian, Native American, have African descent, uh, the actual real-life experience of what they've had to endure is already sometimes just heart-wrenching, right? So that alone is already not okay for God's children to be so ostracized all the way up into the modern day. But furthermore, I just think it expands upon this needed for this, it expands upon the need for nuance of actually believing wholeheartedly that these are prophets that speak for God when they are such men of their times and acting, you know, so many better men of their time could have been chosen besides Brigham Young, besides, you know, Ezra Benson, besides people who were ardent racists who believed these things and then called them doctrine, and all the way up to Elder Oaks when he was talking about the, the ban on black people not being able to enter the temple until 1978 or receive the priesthood, and he was wrestling with it, and he basically throws God under the bus, which is what these modern prophets kind of do when they're like, I don't understand this, it must have come, you know, straight from God, surely couldn't be us being racist and of ourselves. Still continually support us in all that you do. And it just speaks to, like, people can be all they want and raise their families and stuff, but there's just some ingrained problems with authority and racist doctrines that actually at least need to be addressed, because if we don't address them, then the prophets are going to continue to be able to make these wild declarations about all kinds of marginalized people. Yeah. Yeah.

Pull out your Occam's Razor again. If God's got his final chance to put his one true church on the earth, it's 1830. You're talking directly to your Prophet Joseph Smith. You're channeling pure revelation of Joseph Smith. He's creating scripture. Are you God, the master of the universe, the kindest, most loving person of all, are you literally going to make your one true church deny black people, black men of your priesthood authority, and deny black married couples and adults the ability to go into these temples that we've talked about to get your most sacred ordinances? Are you all-powerful and all-loving God going to inject that level of systemic racism into your one true church for like 200 years? And the only thing that's going to convince you to change that, and change it 20 years late, by the way, is when Stanford University and Berkeley University and the University of Wyoming start wearing black wristbands and protesting your athletic events with, with your university, which is BYU? And that's going to be what makes you, God, change this super systemic racist teaching? And then when it's all done, you're not going to just apologize to those black people and say, sorry, we excluded you in a racist way for 200 years. Um, you know, you're not even going to apologize and say, sorry, that was wrong, we shouldn't have done that. You're just going to like pretend that, you know, God changed his mind, God improved the system. It just strains all credibility. Pull out your Occam's Razor and all-loving, all-powerful God is not gonna, um, run his one true church that way. Full stop. Full stop. And we always just gotta, I want to throw Ezra Benson under the bus. God, what are you doing having Ezra Benson in there? This is embarrassing. Or Brigham Young. I mean, for the modern day, at least, when there's like, uh, what is it, George Wallace, who's the governor of Alabama, who's running for president like on a segregation platform in the 1960s, and who should I pick as my vice president? And he goes to, oh, the Mormons, a Mormon Apostle. My cousin, as Jeon. Yeah. Well, yeah, that whole racist, uh, rant that you went on really atoned for a lot. So I'm working on it. So all right, should I pick another one? Two more. Okay. Next. Yeah.

Okay, speaking of the devil, not prophets. John, modern-day prophets. I think, oh, is that mine or yours? That's yours. Oh, okay. Yeah, you did modern LDS prophets. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is a great segue from racism to to modern-day prophets. Like it, like, uh, yeah, so like a natural better segue from racism to modern-day prophets. Yeah. Like the Mormon Church wants to say that, you know, once upon a time, you know, in the Bible was being written, that, you know, God spoke to men through prophets, and so God talked to Adam, and God talked to Moses, and God talked to Abraham, and God talked to David, and God talked to Ezekiel, and Elias, and Malachi, and then, you know, Jesus came, and then God talked to Peter, and James, and John, and Paul. And, you know, so for like, according to the Mormon narrative, for like 4,000 years, God spoke to his people through prophets. And we need prophets because God can't talk to us, talk to us himself. And that's its own problem. Why in the world is God, the creator of the universe, not just able to come to me and talk to me, or come to you and talk to you, but instead he's going to talk to like, one white dude every generation, and we're supposed to just believe that white dude that somehow he really is talking to God versus all the other dudes who claim they're talking to God? How do we know which dude God's talking to? Like, it's a problem because the Muslims think that God's talking to, you know, um, Allah, and, you know, Jews think they're talking to Moses, and Mormons think they're talking to their guy, and David Koresh, his followers think they're talking to him, and Jim Jones. How do you know which prophet God is talking to? That's a problem. But anyway, why can't God just talk to us? But that's not the biggest problem of all. So like, God, um, according to Mormon theology, talked to humankind for 4,000 years through prophets. And then when Jesus came and died, all of a sudden God just stopped. So this is the teaching of the restoration or of the apostasy. It's literally Mormon doctrine that somehow the creator of the universe, God, the Almighty, when Jesus died, had to stop, had to stop talking to his hum, you know, his people through prophets for 1,830 years. Now, isn't that interesting? 1,830 years. What, you know, what does that take us to? What year does that take us to? Or actually 1,820 years. What is it? What happened in 1820? It's literally when Joseph Smith claimed God talked to him. So coincidentally, we're supposed to believe because Joseph Smith said it, that after Jesus died, God went 1,820 years not talking to his children through prophets until Joseph Smith allegedly talked to God. At Jesus. Why? Cara, why did God have to wait 1,820 years to talk to his children through prophets once he stopped? Can I know? Brad Wilcox, tell me. So that's a problem. And then Joseph Smith suddenly said that he's the one that talked to God. Now he's ushering the new dispensation. And so, wow, Joseph Smith, tell us all the amazing things that God's telling you. And we've already shared some of those. It's like, baptize dead people in a temple, black people don't get to have the priesthood or get married in the temple for 200 years. You know, Native Americans were cursed with dark skin because of their wickedness. This is the type of garbage that God chooses to tell his true prophets. You know, told them to boil their water. Oh, wait, that was science. At least he told them that, uh, gay people are just born that way. But yeah, you're stealing my thunder. But that's true. But at least they told him all of the correct things that science has also concluded as well, except for not at all. No. Yeah. So instead of saying, here's how to not get sick, here's how to prevent heart disease, here's how to have a healthy civilization, he's like, Joseph Smith, you need to have sex with this 14-year-old, or I'm going to kill you with a flaming sword. Or Emma, you need to let Joseph Smith keep sleeping with 14-year-olds, or 16-year-olds, or 18-year-olds, even though he's been lying to you for several years about it. Emma, you know, God tells Joseph, if you, Emma, don't let Joseph sleep with all these 30-plus women, I'm going to destroy you, Emma. And that's literally in Doctrine and Covenants 132. So these are the types of things. Or, or like, don't drink hot drinks. That's what God tells Joseph Smith that we shouldn't drink hot drinks. And of course, we continue drinking hot chocolate and coffee. But like, that's what God has to say. Don't drink hot drinks. Like, and, and then God, then the prophets interpret that for two centuries as coffee, tea, and like soda pop. Like, that's what God has to tell us. Uh, and along with the racist stuff, along with like, women shouldn't hold the priesthood. Like all this garbage that we've been talking about, all these untrue things, the weird God theology, the, the Jesus, you know, guilt-based theology, the, the weird temple ordinances and the Masonic temple ordinances, and the racism, and the homophobia, and the sexism, all of the stuff that we've been bemoaning comes from modern-day prophets that God is apparently talking to. So instead of God being the author of order in Mormonism, God through prophets is literally the author of confusion and bigotry and racism, sexism, homophobia, and confusion. It makes no sense. And then when you think about like, okay, humankind over the past 100, 120 years has made a lot of advancements. Like women used to be cattle or chattel, and now they're able to vote. Well, the Mormons, you know, weren't super supportive of the Equal Rights Amendment. Like the, the Mormon Church literally fought to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and defeated it. Civil rights movement comes in. It's like, oh, great. Humankind was able to, you know, give freedom and equality to black people finally. Oh, guess what? The Mormon Church prophets and revelators fought the Civil Rights Movement, and it took them 20 extra years to, uh, you know, to start denouncing racism. Really? Mormon prophets, seers, and revelators, same with LGBTQ stuff. Like for infinite amount of time, you know, humankind has been been anti-LGBTQ, has been bigoted towards gay, lesbian, and trans people. Well, uh, as soon as, you know, humankind in the United States started becoming more LGBTQ affirming, started to approve same-sex marriage in several states, um, the Mormon Church steps up, does Prop 22 in California, follows it up with Prop 8 in California, and spends its billions of dollars and its time and its money and its influence to try and fight same-sex marriage, to take legal same-sex marriage away from Californians, and to sort of promote anti-LGBTQ homophobia and bigotry that leads to an LGBTQ youth Mormon suicide epidemic. Like that's what we can rely on for Mormon prophets, seers, and revelators, that they will not only say a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic, and scientifically, um, invalid things, but they're going to actually fight and use their billions of dollars and their power and their influence to slow down and fight against the major civil rights accomplishments of our multiple generations. That's what we get with God's one true prophets on the earth. Take us back to pre-restoration, take us back to the apostasy, because thank you very much, Mormon prophets and revelators, we can do without your noise. Damn. We're coming for you, Russell M. Nelson. Am I wrong? Like, how am I wrong?

John, you are right as always. That's a great summation of everything that the proposition that Mormonism tries to sell people on. And when it actually push comes to shove, you're actually looking at it and putting the pieces together like you just did. It's like, what is this proposition after all? No, literally, like Oprah, or Dr. Phil, in all his flaws, or Mehmet Oz, or Brené Brown, or Shali Sabari, or Eckhart Tolle, or Neil deGrasse Tyson, or, you know, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Delin, take your pick, Maya Angelou. I can name 100 or 1,000 that are more wise, more smart, more science-based, more ethical, more moral than than the prophets and revelators that the Mormon Church has produced. I would rather follow you, Cara Barell, than follow D.H. Oaks or Russell M. Nelson. We gotta be careful because, full stop. Yeah. I have really could go places. You know, I, I'd pick you. Thanks. I'd pick you. I have so much inadequacy from the Mormon Church to even believe I could lead. So maybe in a couple years, I could try. But I think you're more ethical than modern Mormon day prophets, revelators. You heard it first here on Nano. John Delin says Nano is more ethical and moral than modern-day Mormon prophets. Yeah, because you're not, as far as I know, a bigot or sexist or racist or homophobe or anti-science. Boom. Cara is better overall. I just want people to live healthier lives and follow their own inner moral guidance and authority and work things out for themselves. But my biggest problem, you're also funnier. Thanks. You're also funnier than Mormon prophets and revelators. I'm allowed to be now. And you're kinder. Thank you. Like, what's not to love about? No, no. So no profit. Thanks. I guarantee you feel better in my office than anyone who's gone to meet with. I've gone to meet with those guys. This is a way cooler. I totally agree. It's very. Yeah. I, if I was, you know, Mormon and I heard you give a kind of rant like that, it would be really hard for me to say that anything you said was incorrect. Because I held on so tightly that at least, you know, the Bible's confusing, and there is a lot of sin in the world, and at least if I follow these guys, I'll be better off than my own. And I think that's kind of where a lot of people stay in this gray area with their, with their testimonies that I stayed in for so long when I was like in a seven-year Jesus Freak phase in in the church. It's like, I'm not going to hold too tightly to what they say or believe. I'm going to go with the words of Jesus. I'm going to follow what I think is right. But the end of the day, it's like, you are by doing that, rejecting the proposition of what this church is, what the temple is. Like, you're not saying you have to love everything within Mormonism, but there's certain things that are the proposition of what it is that so many people are like, I don't need to follow that. And it's like, are you following the, Cara, follow the John, don't follow me. John, we need women leading for a little while at least. For a little while, women lead. Podcast. There's only a couple of us. One more. Does the tower fall? Okay, I'm gonna push it this way. You see if you can receive it, and we'll see if the tower, we'll see if the tower falls. You got it. You got it. You ready? Mhm. You got it. Is it coming? Oh, no, no. What happened? What happened? No. All right. But you saved, you saved the last one, John. We still talk about it. The, because it's, we had, sorry, we were picking things in an interesting succession here. Would you agree? Went from racism, which led into modern-day prophets, and then this one is the one that ties it all together for me. Oh, which is Plan of Salvation. That ties it all together. It does. It not so. Well, wait a minute. The Plan of Salvation is like, we all get to live, live with our loving Heavenly Father as families forever. What's wrong with that? Cara Barell. Well, as you can see, there's a lot of great plan puzzle pieces of things on the floor right now. And I've sat with enough people for people who try to hold up that Jenga tower to realize they need to let it fall, and their eternal salvation and sealing to their family be damned, they got to live authentically to the pieces being on the floor, and there ain't no rebuilding that Jenga tower. So the Plan of Salvation, first and foremost, me and you, John, we are Sons and Daughters of Perdition, are we not? That by actually accepting the church as it was taught to us from childhood, that we got baptized, made these covenants in the temple, and that we finally discovered all of this information by not maintaining our covenants, we are in the worst luck of all humanity, which is we accepted it, we rejected it, and now we are outcasts forever. We go to the worst hell of all the hells of God's beautiful plan of happiness. You and me, John. Is there ping pong? Yeah. And I mean, like, it's kind of interesting because this, this set of blocks on the floor literally are the building blocks of the Plan of Salvation. Like, if all the building blocks of the Plan of Salvation are problematic, what good is the plan? But also, the Plan of Salvation is also referred to in Mormonism as a great plan of happiness. And there are happy people in Mormonism. I would say at least on a surface level, but you don't have to scratch very deep into understanding the Mormon people to see that there are high rates of depression among women, uh, high level of not just prescription drug use, but like illegal prescription drug use among Mormons, uh, there are higher divorce rates, uh, amongst Mormons, uh, problematic divorce rates, again, we've talked about high level of, uh, suicide rates amongst LGBTQ Mormons, and people are just fleeing the Mormon Church in droves. Yeah. So if the Plan of Salvation is the great plan of happiness, why are so many people abandoning Mormonism and or staying in it, but with very high levels of depression, anxiety, and even suicidality? Again, that's not to say that everyone's miserable in the church. How happy were you in the church? I was happy only because I like jailbroke Christianity in a way where I was concentrating on the best aspects of this idealized version of Jesus Christ that I wasn't getting from Mormonism, but I expressed that faith within Mormonism because of its structure. So I'm like, I was happy because I thought about the best aspects of Jesus Christ. Yeah. And which isn't Mormonism, which really, it's not Mormonism. Mormonism is Joseph Smith. Yeah. Yeah. You weren't focusing on the temple and baptisms for the dead and slitting your throat and Loni versus Knie fights and, you know, racism in the Book of Mormon and the exclusion of the priesthood and all the stuff we just talked about. That's not what you were focusing on. It's like, Jesus says, be kind to people. I'm focused. Not Mormonism. I know. I was focusing on what we talked about with the rebrand of like, the very authority that the proposition of this priesthood and everything, and the church's proposition of restoring this church in opposition to the great abominations of all the other Christian creeds that Joseph Smith had to come in. Just as the same way that the church knows that that's a popular brand that they're going to attach themselves to. Like that's what I attached myself to for seven years to stay within the church because like Christ has a pretty good brand overall. He's known, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Like it seems like what you're saying, and what I think we're saying, is the only way to be happy in Mormonism is to downplay or disbelieve the core tenets of Mormonism. Yeah. In other words, just be a loosey-goosey, mainstream, fuzzy-believing Christian. Yeah. But that's not, we didn't need Joseph Smith and the restoration and the Mormon Church and the priesthood and the temples to do any of that. To do any of that. You want my kids to have a place to go to for school or for Sunday school or something? It's like, I think I stayed in for so long because I had these idealized versions of how I was going to be able to baptize, you know, my kids in this structure, and they can go to girls' camp. Like, I couldn't imagine living without the structure. But that's just like the, the, the framework of where to go, where to find community, where all these basic human needs are met. But the actual teachings of the church, of what I was instilled with, I rejected as most of the way that I lived my life. And like the people that you, you and I have talked about that helped, you know, raise us and give us good morals and guidance and values outside of our parents, like those were available within the, this construct of the Mormon Church. That's the church building you go to find them. But truly, when Jesus said the kingdom of God is within, I think that's ubiquitous across, you know, all cultures and all people that you don't need this type of structure and this authority and paying 10% and these rituals to be able to get that. Like, you will good people wherever. Can we not like build these communities where you'll find good, inspirational, wise people from all the different, you know, lanes that you mentioned? It's just, in, in Mormonism, you think that that is the ultimate lane, the ultimate place. But I surely looking back, I didn't live as if I said the church was true, but I didn't live as if I really believed or cared about a lot of those things. And most Mormons don't. Most Mormons don't believe that. Most Mormons versus what's the other word? Utility. Utility Mormons. Yeah. Most Mormons don't believe that black skin is a curse, even though it's doctrinal. Most Mormons don't believe that God would tell Joseph Smith to marry 14-year-olds and 30-plus women and command Emma to accept the polygamy or he'll destroy her. So most Mormons just ignore that. Most Mormons just ignore, uh, the homophobia and just try and pretend that it doesn't exist. They ignore. If you ask the average Mormon, is it true that you Mormons believe that all other baptisms and marriages are invalid? They'll like shrug and go, well, that's not really what we believe. That's, but that's literally what they believe. But they just don't think about it. They don't think about it. Do you believe that God poops somehow some sort of celestial feces because like he's got an anus and a digestive system? They don't think about it. So like, the only way to be a happy Mormon is to not think about and not believe in Orthodox Mormonism. I think we've demonstrated that. Yeah. So like, those are the 10 things. And I know it's probably offensive to some to see that the Jenga tower, you know, ends up on the floor more metaphorically. And although I'm sure that was very predictable, but I'll just say this, like, I understand that these beliefs are sensitive to Mormons. I understand that these are sacred to you. And our goal isn't to denigrate you or offend you, even to criticize you or what you love. It's this is literally just our reflections having been lifelong Mormons. Yeah. Seeing the harm, seeing the deception, seeing the way information is withheld from people, seeing the logical conclusions of the these doctrines and theologies that that the church has taught us forever. This is just our frank, uncensored, or lightly censored candor. And it may seem painful, it may seem, uh, you know, um, sad, uh, or sensitive to hear your sacred things talked about in this way, but, you know, like Mormon scripture says, the guilty taketh the truth to be hard, for it cuth them to the very quick. Wow. Didn't expect you to throw that in there. Got to throw the little Mormonism back at the. Oh, yeah. You know, in Abraham, or that scripture mastery where Abraham says, like, God showed me all of the wise spirits before the Earth came down, and I stood among those who were noble and saw that they were good. It's just the people in the room right now. So us now. We went too far. Now we. All right, John. Well, and you didn't leave the church, you were kicked out. So, yeah. Yeah. I was in. I was gonna stay in until they excommunicated me for having a podcast and talking openly about these problems. That's why I was excommunicated. Yeah. And we, uh, love the work that you do. What's the name of your, your podcast? Will you plug your little thingy? Your little podcast? What's the name? Sorry. Yeah, my podcast is called Mormon Stories. You can find it on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. It's even, yeah, it's in all those places. And you co-host several of those episodes. Yeah. There's certainly my best episodes, the ones where you co-host. Not true. It's Margie. It's Margie. It's all about Margie. It actually is. I don't know what you had to do to like finally convince Margie, because she should have always been your co-host all the time, believe me. I tried. Yeah. And the last thing she probably wanted to do was literally, she's so good. She came around. Yeah. I'm so happy that. Thanks for creating a space for Margie. I appreciate. Yeah. We won't mention anything else in the in between. What else is there to talk about? No, nothing else. You just seamlessly from benevolently, you benevolently stepped out and Margie slipped right in to take your immediate place. Yeah. And that's what the record will show. Perfect. All right. Well, John, I love going through history with you and talking about all these things. I do wish that we still could work together. Mostly, I mean, we are on a daily basis now that the John Larson episodes are over. Oh, yeah. I wish we had something else to do, but I've told you, you get a good idea, you come to me. Okay. We, we'll do it. I started a nonprofit called The New O Hug Foundation back in September 2023. A lot of support from John and other people in the space. So I want to be able to do something awesome, fun, female-led, good information, and make podcasts like this for many years to come. So if you like this content and you say, Cara, you're doing a good job, I have a tip jar in my Venmo down below, as well as a Donorbox. And everything is tax-deductible in the United States. And John knows running a whole podcast and then a business that's a 501c3 nonprofit on top of it, it's kind of like, in some ways, putting both arms behind your back in a way. But I did it because I wanted to be sustainable and transparent and set myself up to do something really meaningful in the space for a long time. So donate to Nano. Pay her a monthly payment, $10 a month, $50 a month, $100 a month, whatever you can afford. Become a monthly donor to Nano podcast. And I'm not paid to deliver this message. And also Mormon Stories, donate to them as well. If you are entertained and you know, inspired by what, only after you donate to Nano, go to MormonStories.org, click on the Donate button, become a monthly donor, and live your best beautiful life. Right on. The Mormon History H Down is available on wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify. You can also join my Patreon. All of these videos are available without ads and some extra fun community perks over on my Patreon.com/Nano. So there's anything else that you think that we missed that are Cara and John, there's obviously a number 11 that you should also include. We would love to read all of your comments down below. Thank you for liking this video. Thank you for subscribing to this channel. I really want to get to 100,000 subscribers and get a plaque like you, John. One more year. I'm sure you'll get it in the next 12 months. Really? Yeah, for sure. Like I say sometimes, don't let anyone else screw up your life. You screw it up for you. That's great. You screw it up for you. All right, that's it for this episode. The Mormon History H Down. Love you so much. Bye. [Music] [Music]