Mormon Apologetics: The Problems w/ LDS Discussions Ep. 46

Welcome and Episode Introduction

John Dehlin 0:00 Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast, LDS Discussions Edition. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is May 26, 2023. Today we are going to be covering the topic of Mormon Apologetics and the problems with Mormon Apologetics. For those of you who are just tuning in for the first time to Mormon Stories or to the LDS Discussion series on Mormon Stories Podcast, we are now on episode, I don't know, 46 or 47 or 48, depending on how these things end up getting released in the numbering. But we are doing our best with our friend Mike and with our friend Nemo to try and analyze Mormon Church truth claims as objectively and as dispassionately as is humanly possible for three people who have been swimming and delving into this stuff for quite some time. We really do encourage you to view this series sequentially, and you can do that by going to Spotify to the LDS Discussions Podcast feed. There you can view or listen to those there. You can go to the Apple Podcast app and you can also view them sequentially on YouTube under the LDS discussions playlist. But you'll get a lot more out of this if you if you watch these episodes in sequence. We really appreciate your support. We need your donations to keep programming like this possible. So please, if you value this content, please go to MormonStories.org click on the Donate button. Become a monthly donor. We are always gaining and losing donors, but if we don't gain enough donors to offset the ones we lose, then we have to start cutting programming. So please support this podcast if you can. We appreciate it. Also know that these LDS discussions episodes are based on a website called ldsdiscussions.com and Mike has assembled a bunch of essays there. So please check out ldsdiscussions.com and please email Mike@ LDSdiscussion.com singularmail.com and let him know how much this series has meant to you so that we can help Mike feel good about the work that he's done. Without any further ado. Hey, Mike. Welcome back to your series.

Mike 2:11 How's it going, everybody? Yeah, I'll just, you know, I'm gonna note right off the bat, it's not that I feel bad about what we've done. I just feel like I've talked about this with people in the past, that I think one of the interesting things about the website is that most people who come across the website come across it after they've come across other material. So it's not that I don't feel like it's made an impact. I think it hopefully has impacted people in a way that's positive. In our last episode, we kind of talked about how, for me it's more like I, I was asked to put, to get the, well, at least the overview project I was asked put together. And so our discussion was more. I don't think that LDS discussions is the first thing people are seeing that's going to just like crack someone's shelf. It's more, I feel like, hopefully, like a more gentle landing spot when you're trying to figure it out. And maybe you're trying to figure out a way that is going to help you to not have to have as much, I don't know, anguish or torment during the process. So you could kind of figure it out with maybe out without feeling as is alone or whatever. So, yeah, so I'm hoping that is what the impact has been for people where at least you're finding this to be helpful, especially when you're trying to figure it all out, because there's so much out there. And actually that's a lot of what we're going to talk about this episode is just there's so much info out there both, you know, for, against however you want to phrase that. And, and so I think this, this whole series is meant to try to kind of trim that down into these different topics to try to make it easier to go through. And if you've made it through all these episodes, you deserve a lot of awards for, for, for sticking with it that long. And I hope it's been helpful.

John Dehlin 3:41 Yeah. And, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm not interested in like being the, the first and main reason people lose their faith. That's never been what Mormon stories has been about, but what Mormon stories has always been about is about helping people once they start to question or doubt or lose their faith, help them process it. Help them realize they're not crazy, help them realize they're not alone and providing them with the content they need to learn to obtain informed consent and then to make healthy decisions for their life afterwards. And I know LDS discussion series has helped tens of thousands and likely at this point, over a hundred thousand people in their, their journey. So we know, we know the value of this mic, even if you, even if you sometimes are unsure. We also want to welcome, as always, to the program Nemo the Mormon from Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel. Hey, Nemo.

Nemo 4:36 Hello. Hello.

Nemo 4:37 How are we?

John Dehlin 4:37 How's life in the uk?

Nemo 4:39 It's warm, quite warm. So there's fans going on. So if you hear a little bit of noise, that's what that's about.

Nemo 4:45 But.

Nemo 4:46 Yeah, And. And seasonally warm. Actually, it's not even June yet, but I'm sure we'll get some rain soon, some familiar rain, and that'll make everyone feel a little bit better.

John Dehlin 4:55 Well, we. We welcome you. We always value you on our show. And please subscribe to Nemo, the Mormon YouTube channel, and donate to Nemo, just like we want you to subscribe to the Mormon Stories Podcast YouTube channel. We're about to hit 150,000 subscribers, and we. And we just hit 100,000, like, at the new year. So in less than six months, we've grown by 50.

Nemo 5:19 It's kind of crazy times. Well, when Mike gets his silver plaque, you can put it in the background and. Yeah, everyone can celebrate.

John Dehlin 5:27 Absolutely.

Nemo 5:27 Have you got your silver plaque here, John?

Mike 5:30 Let me see.

Nemo 5:30 Come on, show the viewers.

John Dehlin 5:31 Let me see if I do. Oh, I think I do.

Mike 5:34 I think I might.

Nemo 5:36 Is that the first time that's been on air?

John Dehlin 5:38 Yeah, it's the first time. Yeah.

Nemo 5:40 LDS discussions exclusive for those who don't.

John Dehlin 5:43 For the. Those who don't know what we're talking about. When you hit 100,000 subscribers, YouTube gives you a plaque. So there it is. And I don't get another plaque until a million, so I don't know if I'll ever get another plaque. But, you know, it's fun. And Nemo, we. We hope you get your plaque soon.

Nemo 6:05 Yeah, I mean, I'm. I'm like a tenth of the way there, so there you go. We're. We're rocking and rolling.

Mike 6:10 Yeah.

John Dehlin 6:11 All right. Well, the subject for today is one of one that's close to my heart. It's Mormon apologetics and the problems with Mormon apologetics. We've got pictures of Daniel Peterson, Kerry Muhlstein, and Terrell Givens there, and there's so many other wonderful people that we could mention. But I'm ready to dive in. Mike, should we just dive in?

Mike 6:31 Yeah, let's do it.

Defining Apologetics in Mormonism

John Dehlin 6:32 All right, so let's define some terms.

Mike 6:35 Yeah. And just to start off the episode, you know, I'm sure if you've kind of been in the space for all you've heard the term apologist, apologetics, all that stuff all the time. And, you know, really just to briefly address how I view them for the least the scope of this episode. You know, this is something that is not unique to Mormonism. It's something you see in religion, you see it in politics. You See it, you know, we talk about even history, you know, and the technical definition of apologetics is the reasoned arguments or writings in justification of something, typically a theory or religious doctrine. And I think for the purpose of this overview, that's a good definition to use. It's basically making arguments to support the Church, and it's done regardless of whether or not they would be acceptable to the consensus of any specific field of study at large. It's more about speaking in defense of the Church without necessarily needing to reconcile that with what we know based on evidence or science or however you want to phrase it. And, you know, this is derived from the Greek word apologia, just speaking in defense. It's very, you know, kind of simple in that regard. And, you know, just to note as we start this episode, it does not necessarily mean that apologetics are dishonest or incorrect or bad. You know, not all apologists are the same. And we'll touch on that throughout this episode as well. Even within Mormonism, you have a wide range of apologists where you've got some who I would argue are intentionally misleading, who you have some that I think are doing what they feel is the best with the info they have. Even if maybe we look at it and say you're still not really just putting the dots together. And that's important to keep in mind with any subject because, let's be honest, that is something we see. Nemo has pointed it out a few times in recent episodes. Critics of the Church can fall into the same camp where you are speaking in attack of the Church without caring about the evidence. And so this is an episode that hopefully will put a little bit of a light on apologetics within Mormonism, but hopefully get us to start thinking a little bit about our own stuff as well, so that we're not falling into these same traps.

John Dehlin 8:39 And we've talked about this before, but I'll just give like a 22nd, you know, history. You know, Mormon apologetics, I would say, started in earnest in the early 20th century with B.H. roberts, who was church historian at the time. He started writing books to defend the Book of Mormon as a historical document. Once science really started emerging, evolution and those sorts of things really started taking hold in the early 20th century, I'd say B.H. roberts was one of the first main apologists of the modern era. Hugh Nibley took that over in the 1960s. He was a professor at BYU who really brought on to start defending the Book of Abraham once the Tanners really started going full force in the 80s and and then I. Sorry, in the. In the 60s. And then I would say that Daniel Peterson, who. We've got a photo of him here. Daniel Peterson took over the mantle of chief apologist for the Mormon Church when they created FARMS at byu. And. And of course, eventually people like John Gee and Kerry Mohlstein and John Sorenson were brought on to help defend the church as well. Mostly out of byu. BYU has been the place where the church has kind of funded traditional Mormon apologetics. And then at some point, FARMS was starting to become irrelevant. They created the Maxwell Institute. Eventually, we helped get Daniel Peterson removed from chief apologist at the Maxwell Institute. Eventually, Spencer Fluman took over. A new sort of apologetics emerged with Spencer Fluman and ultimately Terrell Givens, who's there now. Um, and, you know, they. They moved from. From apologetics 1.0 to what I like to call neo apologetics or apologetics 2.0. And that's why we have a photo of Terrell Givens there. And I don't know if we're going to be getting into all that today, but that's sort of a really quick overview. Anything else you want to add, Nemo, before we jump in to the next.

History of Mormon Apologetics

Nemo 10:49 Before my time, really. So I really only know if sort of Hugh Nibly onwards. But if you do want to learn more about B H Roberts, the OG his book Studies to the Book of Mormon is great for that.

John Dehlin 11:02 Yeah. And also one of my favorite series on Mormon stories is the Shannon Caldwell Montes series, where we talk about how B.H. roberts, who was again, one of the chief apologies for the Church, how it's likely that he lost his testimony of the Book of Mormon as a historical document towards the end of his life. And there are other apologists who have lost their faith. The backyard professor, Kerry Schurz is someone who is on the Bill Riehl network now. He's a great one to talk to. Bill Real himself worked for Fair Mormon before he kind of got excommunicated and lost his faith. And there are other apologists along the way who have lost their faith. But anyway, Mike, should we jump to the next slide?

Mike 11:47 Yeah. I would just point out Kerry Schurz was actually one of the founders of Fair Mormon. He was there at the very beginning. So he was someone who was a defender of the faith for a long time. And then he now has his own part of the Mormon discussions podcast channel, going over a lot of truth claims and does a really good job. Radio Free Mormon has released cassettes when he's doing kind of Apologetic responses. I mean, you know, there's a joke that the. What's the phrase? It's like the best critics used to be apologists or something like that. And it's true, because there's a point, and we'll talk about that through this episode, where when a lot of people do think, like, I can jump into this tank of sharks and I can find the answers, and you think you can kind of outswim the sharks for long enough, but at some point, you realize that the only way to make it work is to either, as we're going to talk about, kind of twist the truth, or if you're being kind of intellectually consistent, you realize that the answers all point to one direction, which we've talked about. But, yeah, I mean, we could go on all day, I think Dan Vogel was never an apologist, but he was a strong believer.

Mike 12:50 Yeah.

Mike 12:51 Anyways, the story is a lot of the people that you. Brett Metcalf, Brian Hoglet, Brian Hoglid, who I would not call a critic, necessarily, but he was someone who worked on the Joseph Smith paper project, and it was working on that project that led him to finally realize that, yeah, the Book of Abraham, all the apologetics are garbage. And he ended up effectively disassociating himself with the church and coming out and saying, yeah, this is absolutely not the case. This is not. The Church is not what it claims to be. And that's someone that was within the last, what, like, two years? So we have a wide history of the people who are really close to all this stuff stepping away. Because at some point, if you're being. And I don't want to impose my own beliefs onto these people, but as we'll look through this, if you want to be intellectually consistent, I'm not saying honest, but consistent, you have to admit this stuff doesn't add up. We talked about that in our last few episodes. So. But, yeah, the list of names of people who used to be apologists, or at least to work in the role of being in defense of the Church, who have left since is much, much higher than the Church would ever want you to believe.

John Dehlin 13:54 I should even add that Spencer Fluman, who I just mentioned is the head of the Maxwell Institute now, he recently either was let go or stepped down or both. I don't even know that they found a replacement for him. And I've been told by direct sources that, you know, Fiona Givens Hirsch, her Mormon testimony is a shadow of what an orthodox testimony would be. She's much more traditional Christian or mystical. Than she is Mormon anymore in her personal beliefs. And even Taryl Givens, now, you know, what he tells people who are close to him in private is again, a shadow of what we would expect a BYU professor apologist to be telling people. Of course, his formal speeches still toe the party line to a great extent, but even Terrell Givens, who's an employee of BYU at the Maxwell Institute, has a shadow of an Orthodox testimony in 2023. So, anyway, we could, we could go off on so many tangents. All right, let's go to the next slide.

Core Problems with Mormon Apologetics

Mike 14:59 Yeah, and this first slide is one I wanted to put at the start because I think this is an area where we need to understand right off the bat what I find to be one of the biggest problems with apologetics with Mormonism, and honestly, this will be with anything, with politics, with. With other religions, is this idea that we have people who will get academic or secular credentials and then use them to push a theological apologetic mindset. And so here is a Mormon church employed Egyptologist named Kerry Mohlstein, and we've talked about him in our Book of Abraham episodes. He's speaking in front of a fair Mormon audience. So he's speaking in front of an audience of people who are basically deep into this idea of not just apologetics, but defending the faith, however you want to phrase it. And he is literally sitting there and telling them that he takes the evidence he gets and he fits it into the conclusion that the church is true. And so he is often cited by the church because of the fact that he has these academic credentials as an Egyptologist, which he then uses to push faith, promoting arguments about the Book of Abraham full well, knowing that he's molding anything he sees to the conclusion the church is true, whereas the members he's speaking to usually do not know that, because he's not putting that in the beginning of an ensign article or, you know, the beginning of his books where he says, I'm just, I'm an Egyptologist, but I'm. I'm working in a theological mindset. He is going at them and saying, I'm an Egyptologist, and here's why you should believe. And so when you watch this clip, keep that in mind because we're going to kind of reference this throughout the episode.

John Dehlin 16:30 All right, so this is BYU Professor Kerry Muhlstein admitting how Mormon apologists approach defending the faith. And so I start out with an

▶ Video Clip 1

Video Clip 1 16:41 assumption that the Book of Abraham and

Video Clip 1 16:43 the Book of Mormon and anything else,

Video Clip 1 16:46 excuse me, that we get from the

Video Clip 1 16:48 restored Gospel is True.

Video Clip 1 16:52 Therefore, any evidence I find, I will try and fit into that paradigm. I don't feel that I need to defend that paradigm.

Video Clip 1 17:00 I feel that I want to understand the evidence that I find within that

John Dehlin 17:04 paradigm, because to me, it's a given that it's true. Yeah. And anyone who knows anything about science and academia knows that that flies in the face of what science and scholarship is really all about. So I can see the point you're making, Mike. It's a conflict of interest for him to be using his academic scholarship and his credentials to defend the faith when his. When his foundational framework is anti academic and fundamentally anti science and he admits it. He says the quiet thing out loud

Mike 17:41 there, except he does it in front of an audience of people who are in on. I hate to use the word, the game, because maybe that's a little too cynical, but they're in on the approach. And he'll have an article in the Ensign, which he had a couple years ago before it changed to Liahona, or he has a book called let's Talk about the Book of Abraham. Or he does these firesides. He doesn't start those out with saying, I am an Egyptologist, but I come to you as a defender of the faith who is not necessarily worried about the evidence. And that's the difference. It really comes down to that. Apologists are using this academic credential to assure that the people they're talking to that you could trust what they're doing because they've been through it all. But what they're not telling you is they're completely setting that aside to promote faith against the evidence. And that really is where you're going to see a lot of this throughout this episode, because it's just a very dishonest approach. And again, as I've said in so many of these episodes, if you saw another. If you saw a Scientologist making an argument in public and you're a Mormon, you'd go, well, yeah, he's making crap up because he's trying to promote Scientology, and he's just using his degree in. Well, I don't even know what you'd call. Because Scientology is crazy. But the point is, if you saw it elsewhere, you'd be like, yeah, he's totally. I don't know what the word is, but making a mockery of his academic credentials because he's using that to push theology. And yet here we're doing it, and everyone's just like, oh, yeah, that's okay. It's just. It's crazy.

John Dehlin 19:11 And we have to note the conflict of interest, because so many of these people literally are. Their. Their salaries, their retirement, their benefits all come from the church. And I just can't tell you how many BYU professors and church employees I've met that admit to me privately they don't believe. But now they're locked in because they can't get jobs elsewhere, and their salaries and benefits in retirement are all tied to it. So there's a real conflict of interest there that they don't admit. Now, of course, people are gonna say that Mike and Nemo and John make money off of criticizing the church. I don't think those are fair comparisons. But. But, Neemo, I'll let you go ahead and jump in if you have a thought in this regard.

Nemo 19:53 Well, I mean, just in terms of his bias, I was thinking about it in terms of if you're looking at it like an academic paper or a sort of scientific literature, that sort of bias would need to be declared. It's the same as you're looking at a study for a medication, only to find out the people that make that medication are the ones that paid for the study. And that needs to be taken into account. It means that you'll scrutinize things more closely. It doesn't necessarily mean the results of that study are wrong, but it means you need to look at it more closely. And it's kind of good that Kerry Mohlstein's put his bias out there and he said, yep, no, this is what I do. But he needs to be more forthcoming with that in more places. It needs to be more well known. And he needs to then accept the fact that ultimately that should undermine his argument because. Or it will certainly weaken his position and maybe realize that if he could remove that bias, he would be doing better work.

Mike 20:45 Yeah. It comes down to. We're going to have. We're going to have a couple slides later about the whole. Is he speaking as a prophet? Is he speaking as a man? Right. You hear all that all the time. Well, Kerry Mohstein, at the beginning of his Ensign articles, at the beginning his book, he should say, I am an Egyptologist. But for the sake of this article, I am not speaking as an Egyptologist. I'm speaking as a paid employee of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Because you. You need to have that disclaimer. Because what he's doing, he's saying, I'm an Egyptologist. And this is why you should believe me. And to Nemo's point, he is being forthcoming here. In this fair Mormon thing. But he's doing it because it's almost like an inside baseball kind of thing. He knows the people he's talking to know exactly what's going on here. But then when he goes out to members who do not know better, he's not telling him. And that is where, as John said, there's a conflict of interest. But I would just say there's just inherent dishonesty in that approach. And he knows that because he's willing to say it here at fairmormon. So if he could say it to them, he knows he could say it to the members. But he doesn't want to do it because the moment you do that all everything starts to crumble because the members are going, why can't you talk to me as an Egyptologist? Why do you have to put the hat of employee on? And all of a sudden you go, oh, because it's not true. And so to me, that's why this is such an important clip. Because yes, it's good he's saying it, but he's only saying it to people that know who are in on it. And I'm not saying they're in on the con, I'm saying they're in on the approach. But to the members who don't know better, they're not going to tell them that.

John Dehlin 22:03 And quickly response to the, the people that say it's the same thing. For critics of the church, it's not. And I'll give three reasons why. One is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And it's the Mormon Church that's made the extraordinary claims that they, that they speak for God, that they speak to God and that what they say, you know, millions of people should follow and believe and give 10% of their income and a huge percentage of their. That's what requires extraordinary evidence and defense. That's the first thing. The second thing is, as Nemo will admit attest to those of us who work in the social media space to try and hold the church accountable did this under extraordinary personal sacrifice. We're not represented by any, you know, quarter of a trillion dollar institution. We started our work as a matter of conscience going years without any compensation. And it's only after years of sacrifice were we able to ultimately cobble together some sort of compensation. And there's only a few of us that can do this full time in the entire world, whereas the church has literally armies and tens of thousands of employees. Just because people are willing to donate to our work, because they find value in it, doesn't mean that we are at the same level of a conflict of interest as those who represent this quarter of a trillion dollar organization. And so, you know, those are just some of the reasons why I just think those, those comparisons just don't fly.

Nemo 23:42 Can I, can I sum that real quick? The thing I always think to my mind is I don't have any institutional bias. I may have some personal biases, like everyone does. Yeah, and you should, you should look at those and examine those and determine whether I am being biased. And I try my best not to be take feedback, etc, but I don't have an institution telling me what line I should take, what narrative I should push, what position I must defend. And that's, to me, what the difference is.

John Dehlin 24:09 And one final thing about Mormon stories is we will interview believers, we will interview apologists, we will interview church employees and BYU employees and give them their shot at making their case. And that's something Mormon apologists will never do. You'll never see a fair Mormon conference where a critic is allowed to come up. I've offered and give a talk. Yeah, so have I.

Nemo 24:29 They've turned me down.

John Dehlin 24:30 Yeah, so. So we at least make attempts towards neutrality, towards objectivity, towards telling multiple sides. They, they won't, they won't even allow that. All right, Mike, let's go to the next slide.

The Past as a Foreign Country Argument

Mike 24:42 Yeah, Just to start off with this one, this is a quote you'll hear very often within apologetics when you talk about especially problems with early church history, is they'll say the past is a foreign country. And we haven't addressed this one as much in previous episodes. It's one you hear a lot about. Polygamy. You hear about the ban on blacks, or I should say the ban on black people. Yeah, yeah, black people. I don't mean to be flipping on that. And so they try to normalize the problems by saying that you can't critique those issues because you suffer from presentism, which is viewing the 1800s through the lens of our norms today. So example would be for the ban with members on black skin. They'd say, well, that's not fair because slavery was legal then. But you're looking at through the lens of 2023. And it's like, that's. We'll get into why that's a problem. But it really does seek to excuse these issues by basically yelling out presentism whenever a question arises about terrible doctrines of the church such as polygamy, the racism in the scriptures and folk magic. And before we get into these problems in the next few slides I want to read. This is a quote from a church historian, Matthew. Matthew Grow. And he used this line in a youth face to face event with elder Quentin Cook. It was in Nauvoo. They're promoting the Saints book. And so this is what he says kind of in how he views. I believe they're talking about polygamy at this point. He says, as a historian, I try to follow the advice of a British novelist. He said, the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. That means when we visit the past, we don't want to be an ugly tourist. That's a signal to the youth not to look at the problems with church history, as you know, with any kind of thing, because you'd be an ugly tourist. But anyways, back to the quote. He says, we want to understand people within their own context and their own culture. We want to be patient with what we perceive as their faults. We want to be humble about the limits of our own knowledge, and we want to have a spirit of charity about the past. And again, Matthew Grow is not going to apply that same charity to other religions, maybe from the past, because of course we think they're all their creeds are an abomination. But he wants to set the stage to the youth to tell them, if you question what Joseph Smith was doing, you are an ugly tourist. And so this is a line that is used to try to basically just completely sidestep these problems by saying you can't know what life was like back then, so you can't talk about it. And that's simply not true.

Nemo 27:05 Can we just point to the irony of an American talking about being an ugly tourist? As a Brit who lives. Sorry. As a Brit who lives in Oxford, I have a lot of experience with ugly tourists. I didn't mean to have offend the American viewers. Please keep coming here and spending your money. Sorry, John, I'll let you say something serious.

John Dehlin 27:23 Yeah. There's the book, the Ugly American. Sometimes we. We don't do well in our foreign acts of diplomacy. Yeah. I would just also say that like a lot of these people who work for the Church History department lose their faith while working for the Church History Department. But they're just locked in and they can't do anything about it. So in their minds, they're either stuck and locked in or they feel like what they're gonna try and do is change the church from within as super progressive liberal Mormons. So they don't believe the Book of Mormon's historical anymore. They don't see it as God's one true church. They don't believe in a lot of the literal teachings of Mormonism, but they're stuck there. And the problem I have with that is when a, when a progressive, liberal, non literal believing apologist defends Mormonism, they're not defending liberal Mormonism, they're not defending progressive Mormonism, they're not defending pro LGBTQ Mormonism, they're not defending feminist Mormonism or you know, multiracial, multi ethnic Mormonism. They're defending the institution of the church to orthodox believers, which is racist, which is secular sexist, which is homophobic, which is, you know, a quarter of a trillion dollar corporate church that literally defends sexual predators and sexual abusers and in the end creates a culture that persecutes victims of sexual abuse. And I know that sounds extreme, but just tune into the Mormon Stories episode this week about how the Mormon Church defends sexual abusers and, and ultimately persecutes victims. I know it's not Matt Grove's intent or Tarot Givens intent or Fiona Givens intent to, to, to protect these sorts of things. In their mind they're fighting against the harm the church does. But ultimately when a, when a top notch scholar stands up publicly and defends Joseph Smith or defends the party line, they're defending all the harm that the corporate orthodox Mormon Church does. Am I too, am I, am I too harsh here, Mike or Nemo?

Mike 29:48 No, no, no. I mean I'll go ahead and Nemo.

Nemo 29:51 I was gonna say I think they've developed a version of the church that is defensible. But like you said, they forget that a lot of people when they view them as defender Mormon Church, they don't realize they're defending that version of the church. They're defending the mainstream church. Can I make a quick point to the, the whole, being an ugly tourist in the past, it's view the past is a different country. The thing again about the church, we said it in the last not that old things weren't actually that different. You know, when Jeffrey R. Holland says there's a great deal of trouble in frontier America, blah blah blah, when he gets very squirmy with John Sweeney in that interview, the reality is what Joseph Smith was doing then in terms of, you know, 14 year old girls and these sorts of things weren't okay then there was a reason Joseph Smith was being tarred and feathered, there was a reason that he was chased from town to town is because people at the time weren't okay with It. That's just my. I always feel the need to point that out.

Mike 30:44 Yeah. I would just note, too, that when we talk about defending the church with this particular line, I actually feel like it's almost. I feel like people who use this line know they're in a losing battle. And this is almost like when you throw a smokescreen and you run because you're not trying. You're. At this point, you're basically saying, I can't defend this. But we also can't talk about it because we can't understand it. Because if you could defend what Joseph Smith was doing with polygamy, you wouldn't have to say the past of foreign countries. Like, oh, yeah, it's fine, and here's why. So I feel like this is actually, in a lot of ways, I think, kind of an indirect admission that you can't defend it. And so because of that, because you're backed in that corner, you're throwing, you're yelling presentism, and you're just running. And I feel like that is why it's dishonest, because you're trying to get out of it with an approach. As Nemo said, that doesn't work. This isn't an era of history where we don't have enough records to be able to make some fairly good assessments as to what was happening. And we also have a lot of outside detail to compare to. And so we'll get into that as we do these next few slides, and

John Dehlin 31:42 I'll just make a quick clarification. I don't know Matt Grow. I've never met him. I've never talked to him, and I don't know what his status of his faith is. What I do know is many people in Matt Groh's position who have lost their faith, who are either, like we mentioned before, who either presently still church employees or BYU employees, but have to stay closeted, or they've left. But I don't want to give the impression that Matt Grow has anything other than an orthodox testimony, because I don't know that. So, anyway, just wanted to make that clear. We're not trying to hurt or out Matt Grow in any way. All right, let's go to the next slide.

Mike 32:19 Yeah, and this is something that was kind of interesting to me because I've heard the presentism line. I've heard the passive foreign country, but I had never heard any context as to what it comes from. And so.

John Dehlin 32:28 And Mike, let me just say I. I pronounce the term presentism, and I don't know if that's the right way to pronounce it, but I don't know.

Nemo 32:36 I'm a Brit. I'm weighing in. I call it presentism.

John Dehlin 32:39 Presentism.

Nemo 32:40 And you quoted the dictionary of the city in which I live.

John Dehlin 32:43 So what do you know about English, Nemo.

Mike 32:46 That's right.

Nemo 32:47 That's right. I've only. I've only seen and held a first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

John Dehlin 32:51 Okay, okay.

Mike 32:52 Oh, I see how it is. All right.

Mike 32:54 Yeah.

John Dehlin 32:54 So keep going, mate.

Mike 32:55 No, no, it's fine. So Radio Free Mormon had done a podcast, and it was about an interview that Stephen Harper, who is also works within Mormon history, he had done a podcast about some apologetics. You know, Stephen Harper had given answers. He wouldn't call them apologetics. And Radio Free Mormon had done a response video. And in this, Stephen Harper also makes the same quote. The past a foreign country. And Radio Free Mormon actually went and read the novel they're talking about. And what's really interesting is the quote is not referring to judging the actions of people hundreds of years earlier. It's actually a quote from a character in a novel who's looking back at the terrible things he did as a teenager, knowing that if he could go back in time, he would do it differently, or if it was in the present, he would respond differently. And so, in other words, the past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there because in the past, he did do things differently than he would do them today, if that makes sense. So it's kind of like, you know, you look at the decisions you made as a teenager, and you're like, oh, man, I would do that so much differently if I could do that over. Or if I'm in the same situation today, I would do it differently because the past, my past life is a foreign country to how I live now. And so, as Radio Free Mormon notes in that podcast, which is number 48, this would, you know, be like me looking back at me talking to the missionaries about the Book of Mormon, and they're telling me about all of these historical things. The first vision, the priesthood restoration. Well, if those missionaries came to me today, I would do things differently because the past is a foreign country. My knowledge about Mormonism as a teenager who converted to the church is differently than today. So I would respond differently today. But that's not the same as saying, I can't assess my decisions as a teenager taking the missionary discussions. It's not about shutting that conversation down. It's just about knowing that I would do things differently today because My teenage years is a past time with past knowledge, with past decision making.

John Dehlin 34:49 Okay, should we do the next slide?

Mike 34:53 Yeah. And really that slide is more to point out that the apologists who are using that are misusing it. Whether or not they're misusing it intentionally, I can't say. But they should know when they're using that as a way to, to sidestep these problems, that they're misusing it. And I think that that is a pattern. We'll see, I guess would be the way to say it.

John Dehlin 35:13 Okay, all right, let's go to the next slide.

Nemo 35:15 Yeah.

Mike 35:16 And so basically when people say the path of foreign country, it really doesn't answer the problems. And so even kind of putting aside that the quote's being misused, it really is just a dishonest approach because there are a lot of things. Nemo said this. The church is not that old. And so we can assess the claims being made, we can assess the actions that were taken. And as we talked about, Joseph Smith at the age of 38, married two 14 year old girls in polygamy under the promise of exaltation if they submitted to his proposal. And apologists will tell you we cannot judge those actions because marriage was different in the 1840s than it was today. And we talked about this in our episodes on polygamy. But we have a lot of data about the age of marriage, about the gaps in age. And we have it both in the us we have it also in Britain. And it turns out that the gap in marriage really isn't that much different back then than it would be today. And so there is no way you can look at the data and find a way that would make Joseph Smith's proposals and his marriages acceptable. And that's not even getting into the fact that it was illegal back then. And so we can assess because it was illegal. And studies have been done, the average age to be married in One chart is 26 for men, 23 and a half for women. The other one, which is a little bit more close to the time, is just over 26 and a half and just over 25 and a half. So the age gap is not 38 and 14. And so while you might be able to find those outliers where there are men in frontier America who are marrying super young girls, it wasn't normal. And as everybody said, there's a reason Joseph Smith kept it secret. If it was super normal for the time, Joseph Smith wouldn't be doing it behind everyone's back. And so you could yell the past is a foreign country all you want, but we know that there's a lot of data to back up that these are not normal issues that are happening within Joseph Smith and early Mormonism.

John Dehlin 37:08 Nemo, you want to add anything to that?

Nemo 37:11 No, I think I made my point already.

John Dehlin 37:12 I'll just say.

Nemo 37:13 I think.

John Dehlin 37:14 Okay, I'll just say that, you know, that argument doesn't fly for me simply because an orthodox Mormon is going to make the point that God's laws, you know, the. God's doctrines are eternal, that they're the same yesterday, today, and forever. And it's just inconsistent to think that God's commandments are going to be relativistic to the time that he's going to say, okay, well, yeah, you could do polygamy in this century, but in this century, polygamy is no longer okay. And, and you know that. That he's going to be tweaking his doctrines and his commandments more specifically, based on the era. I know that we've got the law of Moses and that Christ fulfills that, but other than that, I just think this relativistic notion of God's doctrines and commandments and it just doesn't fly with my understanding of orthodox Mormonism.

Nemo 38:12 Yeah, I think it's exactly the same reason that church leaders now will give for not being inclusive of gay marriage and not supporting views that don'. That don't align with that of the church, that God's laws change for no man. So they, they can't have relativism in one breath and then say that things are unchanging in the next. It doesn't work.

John Dehlin 38:32 Yeah. And in what century is God, okay, sodomizing a child or, or Che, you know, cheating on your wife or lying to the, to the community about what you're privately doing? Like, there's, there's just. What century is that going to be okay for God? Like, it's just silly, you know? Yeah, yeah. I mean.

Mike 38:50 Yeah, it's just, it comes down to, like I said, I don't think this. I think this whole line of thinking is not to defend. It's to get away from having to defend it.

John Dehlin 38:57 Yeah. All right, let's go to the next slide.

Judging Joseph Smith by Historical Standards

Mike 39:00 Yeah. And so just to kind of piggyback off the last one, we can assess Joseph Smith's actions. I wrote this in 2021, I should say in 2023 as well, while still acknowledging what was legal, normal, and acceptable back in the 1830s and 40s. And in addition, we can note that racism was of course, rampant in Joseph Smith's time. And consider that when assessing the church's truth claims and their scriptures, while also noting that there were a lot of people that did fight against slavery while Joseph Smith was literally codified, codifying it into the Bible to justify it. Joseph Smith, as we've talked about, went in his Bible revision and put that black skin was a curse from God at the same time that a lot of people were fighting against slavery and fighting against racism. And, you know, another good example is the mound builder myth. You know, part of the racism towards Native Americans was, as we've talked about, this belief that was created by the settlers, that the Native Americans had killed off some ancient superior white race, which just happened to become the main storyline of the Book of Mormon. And as we talk about the racism of the scriptures. And Mormonism is supposed to come directly from God, So it should not matter if we're visiting a foreign country when we're taught, as Nemo said, that God is the same today, yesterday and tomorrow. And as we pointed out in a lot of these previous episodes, the Church is always seeking to create this equation of tails, I win, heads you lose. And in this case, they're looking to create this equation of if we like what Joseph Smith did and feel we could still defend it, it's a timeless doctrine. On the other hand, if it makes us feel uncomfortable, it's only because you can't understand what was acceptable in Joseph's time, because the past is a foreign country. And that is again, why I want the consistency and the intellectual consistency and honesty to be able to say, yeah, this is 200 years ago. But we have a lot of data, we have a lot of outside accounts from beyond the church that we can compare to to see how Joseph Smith acted compared to what was not only normal for his day, but also within the confines of what Joseph Smith is claiming is coming from God.

John Dehlin 40:50 Yeah, there's also, you know, the thing they're doing these days of calling it doctrine until there's massive social opposition, and then all of a sudden they demote a doctrine or teaching to just a policy to just the heirs of, of prophets. You know, like with the, the priesthood ban on, on people of color, like with polygamy. When Gordon Hinckley tells Larry King it's not doctrinal anymore, that's another shell game that they're kind of playing.

Nemo 41:22 But then they take policy very seriously, because if you look in the church handbook, it's listed under an offense of apostasy to be openly critical of church Policies, not just doctrines, but policies. So, as Peter Bleakley would put it, if you've got an issue with how many sets of paper that we ought to keep in the building, which is a matter of church policy, then you're an apostate.

Mike 41:45 Yeah.

Misleading Footnotes and Cherry-Picked Sources

John Dehlin 41:47 All right, let's go to the next slide.

Mike 41:49 Yeah. And so one of the blog posts I had done on the website was called Follow the Footnotes. And I took 10 of the footnotes from the church's Gospel topics essays, and I believe there's one from Saints, I think, and just looked at what the footnotes actually say versus how they're being used. And so this is one example. I think I have two in these slides, and this one's about the Book of Abraham. And so in the Church's Book of Abraham essay, the church is forced to admit that the Egyptian papyri do not mention Abraham and that they date about 2,000 years after Abraham would have even lived. If Abraham was a real person in that time frame, it still dates way later. And because of these massive problems, the Church is going to use the essay to provide the common apologetics that we've talked about, which is like the Lost scroll, the Catalyst theory. And so when they're trying to lay the groundwork for the Catalyst Theory, they provide this paragraph with a citation. So I don't know if Nemo, if you want to read this paragraph.

Nemo 42:40 Sure thing. Oh, there we go. Neither the Lord nor Joseph Smith explained the process of translation of the Book of Abraham. But some insight can be gained from the Lord's instructions to Joseph regarding translation. In April 1829, Joseph received a revelation for Oliver Cowdery that taught that both intellectual work and revelation were essential to translating sacred records. It was necessary to study it out in your mind and then seek spiritual confirmation. Records indicate that Joseph and others studied the papyri and that close observers who believe that the translation came by revelation. As John Whitmer observed, Joseph the seer saw these records and by the revelation of Jesus Christ could translate these records. Sorry, I got so caught up in what I want to say about this, I struggled to even finish the paragraph. That wasn't the way it worked for the Book of Mormon. And that was a divine translation. It was just revealed to him through the seer stone in his hat. So now adding in this, oh, well, you had to study out in your mind. And there needs to be this intellectual component to translation. It's just nonsense. Why is God changing the rules of the game?

Mike 43:49 Yeah. And what's funny is the study, it out in your mind thing was really Joseph kind of beating down Oliver because Oliver's like, I want to translate too. And Joseph's like, yeah, give it a shot. And then it fails. And then Joseph gets that other revelation. He's like, well, I told you to study on your mind. You didn't do that, dude. And it's too late for you to do it now, so just sit back and be a scribe. That's basically what the revelation says. And so to Nemo's point, this is trying to conflate the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham, but they're not the same. And so it's already clunky. But that's not even the worst part. And so, yeah, this is. This is an interesting exercise in apologetics to kind of see how this, this is going to work because they know they're in a corner and they're trying to find a way out because Joseph Smith got the translation wrong.

John Dehlin 44:29 Yeah. My understanding is that Hugh Nibley is famous for having problematic footnotes, especially given that he's a PhD level scholar. I think, on the one hand, I believe those claims. On the other hand, it all seems so cryptic and unintelligible. His work and his writings and the. Even the topics he's covering that I think that's part of the tactic is for apologetic, for. For Mormon academic apologists to make the discourse in the conversation so technical, so in the weeds, that most people just give up, throw their hands up and say, well, if Hugh Nibley has a PhD from UCLA and he sounds intelligent, I'll just put my trust in him that everything's okay with the Book of Abraham. But clearly my understanding is he has a footnote problem.

Nemo 45:22 Well, same reason people listen to me is because I sound intelligent.

Mike 45:26 It's the British accent you do. But, yeah. Now, if we go to the next slide for this is the Gospel topics essay. And so we just read that paragraph. So they're going to give you a footnote here, which is footnote 31, and it's going to reference a letter written by Warren Parish, and it has the quote, I have set by aside and penned down the translation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics as he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration of heaven. That is the quote they're going to use to make the claim in the previous paragraph that we read from the essay where they talk about how people next to him said that he studied the papyri and believed that the translation came by revelation. That's where that's coming from. Warren Parish was the former secretary of Joseph Smith, who fell out of favor because of what he considered to be improper financial dealings by the prophet Joseph Smith with the Kirtland Safety Society. And what's funny is in this letter, Warren Parish is actually presenting evidence that Joseph was using things like the book of Abraham and his Dune bank to take advantage of people. And so what I talked about, the reference they use is that one quote, if you actually look at the same letter, he actually talks about Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon by saying that their lives have been one continued scene of lying, deception and fraud, and that too, in the name of God. And so basically, this quote that they're using from Warren Parish as evidence of Joseph Smith being a prophet and being able to receive revelation is sandwiched in between lines detailing how Joseph Smith was misleading the members of the church through the Zion's camp, through the Kirtland Safety Society. And you can read this because this is a letter that's online. We have a link from our website. And read it, because when you read the letter and then you read how they're using it in this Gospel Topics essay, you could see just how dishonest it is to use this as some sort of a source that somebody believed Joseph Smith was receiving credible revelation. This is Warren Parish basically just let. Just, you know, talking about all of the time he spent with Joseph and how much of a deceiver he believed him to be. And the church is going to clip this one little part out to try to provide evidence that, yeah, Joseph totally was getting revelation in that translation.

Nemo 47:25 Yeah. There's another guy, one of Joseph Smith's scribes, who was it now who wrote down the book of Abraham for him? And they try and say that, oh, well, Joseph Smith didn't write the book of Abraham down, actually, it was his scribe, you know, and his scribes have opinions. But that same scribe had written two sections of Doctrine and Covenants. Who is that, Mike?

Mike 47:44 I can't remember.

Nemo 47:44 William Clayton.

Mike 47:46 It could be. I don't think it's W.W. phelps. It probably is Clayton because he and

Nemo 47:52 the church tries to use him and say, oh, well, you know, Clayton was just writing his opinion about what he thought Joseph was doing. So I know Clayton was trusted to write sections of Doctrine and Covenants. So you. You can't pick and choose what Joseph's trust describes, can be trusted to say and not trusted to say to suit you. Just to add on to this.

Mike 48:09 Yeah. And what William Clayton, I believe is, I'm pretty sure is the one that the church tries to say, well, DNC132 was. Was. Was recorded by William Clayton. So maybe Joseph wasn't really doing all those things, you know? But, yeah, I mean, William Clayton was. William Clayton was there. I believe he was the one that wrote the journal entry for the Kinderhook plates. And so people try to say, oh, it's just William Clayton putting his own mind. It's like, no, William Clayton was there. He was working for Joseph. He was putting everything as Joseph said. And this idea that these scribes are the ones making the errors is just. We talked about that in previous episodes. It's nonsense.

John Dehlin 48:41 All right, let's go to the next slide following the footnotes with Brigham Young and the priesthood band.

Mike 48:46 And so this is the second example I wanted to pull from that blog post I had done. And this is another area where you look at apologetics. And this is the church's official essay on race and the priesthood. And they discuss Brigham Young's implementation of the ban of black members from the priesthood. And the essay cites a quote from Brigham Young in order to try and both soften the ban as well as to foreshadow the lifting of it about 130 years later. And so the church's official essay says, at the same time as the ban, President Young said that at some future day, black church members would have all the privileges and more enjoyed by other members. And again, this is footnote number nine. And the problem is they're leaving out all of the surrounding material from Brigham Young. And so this is from the same citation of Brigham Young's speech. And I'm not going to read all of it, because this is a pretty horrible speech if you've ever read it. But Brigham Young starts by saying, now, I tell you what I know. When the mark was put upon Cain, Abel's children was in all probability Young. The Lord told Cain that he should not receive the blessings of the priesthood, nor his seed, until the last of the posterity of Abel had received the priesthood until the redemption of the earth. And so basically, the church is going to cite this tiny little snippet from Brigham Young's speech to be like, see, Brigham Young totally thought it was going to happen soon. But what they leave out is that Brigham Young said that members of black skin would not receive the priesthood until every single white person on earth had the chance to get it. And this speech is horrific. This is one of the. If you've never. If you go on YouTube and look up Jonathan Streeter's thinkers, think, my gosh, think around thoughts and stuff. Right. I think I'm screwing up the name a little bit. But anyways, he reads this speech and it is just insane what Brigham Young was saying in the speech. It's so horrible. And so the church is going to try to clip out this little part and make a footnote out of it to try to say, see, they knew all along. It does not match in any way, because what Brigham Young was saying does not in any way reflect what the Church is trying to say. It does in the essay.

John Dehlin 50:47 All right, any comments? Nemo?

Nemo 50:50 I've pointed this out before. You know, it's just they constantly, apologists and defenders of the Church constantly accuse people like me, people like John, people like Mike, of taking things out of context. And it's why it's really important to provide footnotes. And I always encourage people to go into the description of my videos and look at the citations because it isn't reasonable to quote an entire paragraph every time you want to use a small quote from within it. Sometimes you have to just to give a quote. But this is a lesson in check the footnotes. Both of my work, John's work, Mike's work, and apologists work. Check the footnotes and read the full quote in context because you'll find things like this.

Mike 51:29 Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin 51:31 All right, let's go to the next slide.

Mike 51:34 Yeah, so the next one kind of is on the same subject. And so this is kind of looking at how apologetic people within the church will cherry pick and misuse sources, as we kind of talked about with the pass the foreign country quote. And one of the best examples you'll ever see is the 2020 come follow me manual, which was a huge brouhaha because it had a section about the curse of dark skin because it was about the Book of Mormon. And this caused a ton of controversy because the Mormon Church acknowledged that the curse of dark skin was actually human skin in the printed manual. But when they had the digital edition, they tried to sugarcoat it because they didn't want to have the very clear racism in their digital manual. And so.

Nemo 52:12 Hang on, it's worse. It's worse than that. Sorry, I need to jump in here. It's worse than that because Gary Stevenson said to the NAACP Martin Luther King luncheon that, oh, we've told members not to use the print version, the manual. We've told them to disregard that and use the digital version. And no communication to that effect, as far as I'm aware, ever actually came from the church. So they lied to the NAACP about the Fact that. Oh, that was a mistake. Sorry.

Mike 52:36 Yeah, no, you're right, because they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and then all of a sudden they're like. Well, the digital one's a lot nicer. It's like. But you printed a manual that went through correlation. So clearly the church didn't see any problem with it when it went off to print. It's a lot easier, as we've talked about in previous episodes, to change digital things. So you don't have the footprint and you also, you know, you don't have to reprint the book, but. Yeah, this is a really bad one.

John Dehlin 53:00 All right, should we keep going?

Racial Teachings and Misused Citations

Mike 53:01 Yeah. So basically, this is the quote that was printed in the Come Follow Me manual that was used from a, you know, basically a citation from Joseph Fielding Smith. And it says the dark skin was placed upon the Lamanites so that they could be distinguished from the Nephites and to keep the two peoples from mixing. The dark skin was the sign of the curse. The curse was the withdrawal of the spirit of the Lord. And then you're gonna see these ellipses. It says dark skin is no longer considered to be a sign of the curse. And so whatever. That's a. Basically like two and a half, three. Three sentences. So let's just go straight to the next slide because this is where it just, to me, is absolutely crazy. That was the printed manual, which everybody was upset about. Now, if you're watching this, I want you to look at this quote. If you're listening, what I want to know is that they're pulling that quote from a section that is effectively five paragraphs and leaving out all of the horribly racist stuff by using those ellipses. So when it said the dark skinned is no longer considered to be a sign of a curse, well, what it actually said was the dark skin of those who have come into the church is no longer considered to be a sign of the curse. But more importantly, the part that they leave out, it says the dark skin was placed upon the Lamanites so that they could be distinguished from the Nephites and to keep the two peoples from mixing. The dark skin was a sign of the curse. The curse was the withdrawal of the spirit of the Lord. That's where it stops in the printed. But this is where it keeps going. And the Lamanites becoming a loathsome and filthy people, full of idleness and all manners of abominations. The Lord commanded the Nephites not to intermarry with them, for if they did, they would partake of the curse. Dark skin. At the time of the Savior's visit to the Nephites, all of the people became united. And the curse of the dark skin, which was its sign, were removed. That is, they all became white. The two peoples became one and lived in full harmony and peace for about 200 years. There were no robbers nor murderers. Neither were there Lamanites nor any manner of ites. But they were in one, the children of Christ and heirs to the kingdom of God. And I'm going to put my little editor's note in all white. And then it says, evil brought return of dark skin. You're not going to see that in the. Come, follow me. Manual says, after the people again fought the Lord and dissensions rose, some of them took upon themselves the name Lamanites. And the dark skin returned. That is, they became dark cursed by God. When the Lamanites fully repent and sincerely receive the Gospel, the Lord has promised to remove the dark skin. So again, if you are a member with black skin or dark skin. And you join the church when you get to heaven, you're going to be white. The Lord declared by revelation that before the great day of the Lord shall come, Jacob shall flourish in the wilderness. And the Lamanites shall blossom as the rose. The dark skin of those who have come into the church Is no longer considered to be a sign of the curse. Many of these converts are delightsome and have the spirit of the Lord, which is a way of saying that, you know, if you join the curse and you have dark skin, we could still consider you to be kind of delightsome, even though you have dark skin. It's a really horrible way to say it. And then he says, perhaps there are some Lamanites today who are losing the dark pigment. Many of the members of the church among the. I don't know how to say this. Catawba Indians of the south could readily pass of the white race also in other parts of the South. So this is the quote that they're clipping from. To avoid putting what was actually said. When they say what Joseph Fielding Smith said. And this was something that was done just three years ago just to show how the church is going to intentionally mislead members about what the church believes about the curse of dark skin.

John Dehlin 56:24 Nemo, you're shaking your head.

Nemo 56:26 It's just terrible. The things that Joseph Fielding Smith said were terrible. And they try to throw God under the bus. The church, time and time again, you go to the race in the priesthood essay, they try and blame God, they, oh, we don't know why God was racist, but we just kind of did what God told us to do. And their own prophets were teaching this. And they've tried to make what he said look as though they weren't being racist. And they're all, look, the curse is removed. But no, you can't. You can't put lipstick on this pig, as it were.

Mike 57:00 No.

John Dehlin 57:01 All right, well, let's go to the next slide. We've done an entire episode on the Happiness Letter. We refer you all to it. But now let's talk about how the Happiness Letter is used within an apologetic context.

Mike 57:13 Yeah, and this is just again to point out how you can clip one little quote out of a longer talk or a longer paragraph and completely lose the original meaning of it. And so just. This is one. We did a whole episode on it. There's a video on thoughts and things and stuff as well of all of these leaders who are quoting this. And this is from Joseph Smith's Happiness Letter. It says, happiness is the object and design of our existence and will be the end thereof if we pursue the path that leads to it. In this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God. But what the leaders are not telling you is that this quote is from a letter that Joseph Smith sent to young Nancy Rigdon in an attempt to convince her that a polygamous marriage and relationship with Joseph Smith was from God and is one of the most, in my opinion, the most problematic document of Joseph Smith's time as prophet. You can read our write up of the Happiness Letter on our website. You can listen to the episode or watch it because it shows how the church can use a teaching that is taking from an intro that is a very coercive and deceptive letter. When Joseph Smith says happiness is the object and design of our existence. The important part is the end where he says keeping all the commandments of God. Because what he will explain throughout the letter is that keeping the commandments of God, which will make Nancy happen happy, is to marry and have sex with Joseph Smith. And I am not exaggerating here. If you watch our episode, you will understand that. And that's what makes this happiness letter so damning for Joseph Smith. So when church leaders quote it as some sort of an uplifting sentence, they're leaving out with the members what it really is saying. And in this case, what he's saying is, happiness is the object and design of our existence. If you marry me as a polygamous bride and have sex with me. And again, that sounds flippant. That sounds really horrible. Watch our episode. It is very much what Joseph Smith is trying to achieve with this letter.

John Dehlin 59:04 And then more importantly, Mormon apologists don't provide the full context and the full information for people to really understand what's going on here. Is that your point?

Mike 59:15 Yeah, it's just to say that you're clipping out this one little thing to basically try to make Joseph Smith sound like such an uplifting speaker. And he did at times give really uplifting thoughts. I'm not saying he was always manipulative. I'm just saying in this one, they're using this quote without even attempting to give the audience the full context of what Joseph Smith is actually saying here. Because if you did, I don't think you'd have as many members tomorrow as you do today. Because it is a horrific letter and it's one that the church wants to get away from as much as they can. Yet they'll clip this out because they think it's really going to give people that nice, warm feeling. And again, you just don't. You're not giving the full context. And as Emo said, you're always going to have issues where you need to give a smaller part of a talk because you don't have time to go through and put the whole talk. But you should also not do it when the context is certainly not what is being indicated by that small clip.

John Dehlin 1:00:07 Emo. Anything, Ned.

Nemo 1:00:09 Yeah, because what they've done is they've taken essentially out of context what Joseph was actually saying to Nancy Rigtin and try and say, look, isn't this a lovely faith affirming quote from Joseph Smith? But the words themselves are lovely, but the way in which they're used weren't. That's all I'd add to that. Yeah.

Redefining Words and Parallelomania

John Dehlin 1:00:27 All right, well, let's go to the next slide which asks the question, how could Joseph Smith have ever known?

Mike 1:00:32 Yeah. And this is one that has been very popular, especially in recent years, at least since I've started doing the deep dive. And so this is one of the greatest tricks that apologists in the church use when it comes to troubling issues is you pick out one point that they claim Joseph Smith got right and then they go, and you see this all the time and say, how could Joseph Smith have possibly known that? And yet here we are. And the problem is, as we've talked about in previous episodes, is that you have to ignore all of these misses to get to one perceived hit. And that's just now how historians evaluate the truth claims of documents that are claimed to be ancient. And we talk about the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. But a good example is you have an archery contest, you take 20 shots and then you look at the one that actually got near the target. And then you have the judge of the contest say, how in the world could you be so accurate? But obviously life doesn't work that way. But in the church, that's how it always goes. And you'll see videos if you watch some of the accounts on TikTok or on Instagram or even on Twitter and they'll post these, these little clips of videos and they'll say, how could Joseph have known? And there's an article that came out a couple years ago in the Interpreter, it was called Joseph Smith the World's Greatest Guesser. And the whole article was basically saying, here are things that Joseph Smith got right in the Book of Mormon. And if you multiply those probabilities, we have a better chance basically of having a volcano erupt and explode the whole world and shoot out jellyfish. And you're just like, no, because you're ignoring all of these misses and you're cherry picking very common hits. Like, how could Joseph Smith have known there might have been Rhodes? Well, because he was around Rhodes. And the point is, this is one where it sounds really convincing to go, how could Joseph Smith have known that the four Canopic jars on the Book of Abraham papyrus were the four corners of the world? Until you realize that that is a common thought of the number four, meaning the four corners of the world. And also the fact that everything else on the papyrus is translated wrong. And so this is one you're going to hear a lot. It's just a really dishonest one because you can't get there without ignoring all of the misses in the, in the interim that Joseph Smith made.

John Dehlin 1:02:28 And then you find out things like he had access to the Adam Clark commentary on the Bible, he had access to all this apocryphal works. And there are all these, you know, the view of the Hebrews, the mound builder myth. There are all sorts of, you know, books and, and newspaper articles and, and that sort of thing that we now know Joseph had direct, direct access to. And he was kind of like a sponge where, where he would absorb information from around him through books, through speeches, through sermons, etc. And then incorporate all of that, whether it's the temperance movement and the word of wisdom, whether it's the polygamy that was being practiced in the Oneida community. And there was a lot of stuff being said about Abraham and about Egypt or about, you know, Israelites and the Native Americans, etc. And, you know, they don't want to ever advance the possible sources from which Joseph would have derived many of his quote revelations or, you know, interpretations, I think.

Nemo 1:03:38 But then the way. The way they fight that, then apologists who do get backed into that corner of having to admit that is they then call them things like an inspired syncretist. Right. Who is it that says that?

John Dehlin 1:03:47 John Terrell Givens.

Nemo 1:03:49 Yeah, Givens. You know, so you've got the people that once, once apologists do get back to that corner of realizing there's all this contemporary stuff around Joseph Smith, they then have to come up with fancy labels and ways of framing that that still make him look like a prophet. Yeah, yeah.

Mike 1:04:02 And one of the ones you just brought up was the Adam Clark commentary, which is one of the coolest things about Hayley Lamond finding that connection is that one of the ones you hear all the time is how could Joseph have ever known that Abraham was attempted to have been sacrificed? And then you find out it's in the Adam Clark commentary, which Joseph Smith used during the revision of the Bible, which means he would have absolutely been familiar with that idea when writing the book of Abraham. And that is where, when you start doing this apologetic stuff and you know what you're talking about as someone, I don't even want to say, as a critic, as a historian, as some idiot like me, you can look at the apologetic like you are full of crap because you're saying, how could Joseph's the greatest guesser in the world. How could he have known? It's like, because he used a source that specifically talked about it a few years earlier when revising the Bible. And so that's where you see these games being played, where they try to say, how could Joseph have known? And if you don't know better, you're like, yeah, that's really compelling. But if you do know better, you're like, I know exactly where you knew from, because everybody knows you know where it came from. And so, and I don't mean to sound like I'm getting upset here, because I'm not upset. Just, I want to point out, this is. I hate to use the word game, but it feels like with some apologists, this is that game where they want to try to make something seem impossible when it's very explainable and they know it, but they don't want to tell you because they, the whole idea is to make sure you keep believing. And so the whole how could Joseph have known? Thing is just one that drives me nuts because you have to sidestep a lot of issues to even attempt to do it. And yet they do it all the time.

John Dehlin 1:05:29 And, and also, let me just refer people to the Origins of Mormon Doctrine episode. I think it was 41 of the LDS discussion series. But there's just, there are so many sources that we have now been able to locate for Joseph Smith's alleged revelations. You just, you realize, you know, whether it's the Three Degrees of Glory and Swedenborg, you know, there really isn't anything novel that Joseph Smith advanced. He just remixed so much information from around him. Check out that episode. I think that's a really important one. All right, let's go to one of my personal least favorite tactics of Mormon apologists, which is redefining words to solve problems in Mormon doctrine.

Mike 1:06:17 Yeah, and we've pointed this out in previous episodes about how so often now the church and apologists will redefine the entire meaning of words in order to try and make the problems go away. And as Nemo has put out, he's got a taper on his microphone. And that's a great example because now you see in the Book Mormon that they say horses. And so you had.

John Dehlin 1:06:37 Dan, let's explain that just a tiny bit more. Nemo, do you want to explain why you have Dan the Tapir as your mascot and give people the historical context for that? And then, and then Mike can make the point. You're muted, Nemo. You're, you're muted.

Nemo 1:06:56 I was doing so well, I turned into RFM at the last moment. Dan the tapia is named after Daniel Peterson, the man who, in order to explain the presence of horses in the Book of Mormon, even in spite of archaeological evidence that horses did not exist in pre Columbian America, he said, well, there were some animals around that may have been able to pull chariots and be ridden as, as horses. And you know, we'll look at the idea of loan words that when we don't have the word for something in our own vocabulary or we don't know the exact name for something, we'll use a word that we're already familiar with. So a four legged creature of a reasonable size will call it a horse. Joseph Smith will call it a horse, because that's the word that would be familiar to viewers, but actually in reality it is the tapir. That was essentially Daniel Peterson's argument. And it's such nonsense.

John Dehlin 1:07:53 And I'm not sure if it was Peterson that first advanced that notion or if it was another apologist, but he's

Nemo 1:08:00 certainly a very strong proponent of it.

John Dehlin 1:08:02 Or maybe he's backed off of it now, but there was certainly a time. Yeah, I think, I think it's. He's been made, he's been mocked mercilessly for that.

Mike 1:08:11 He has. And I, for some reason, I thought there was someone else who had proposed the first and he was the one that kind of like used that and something he had done is everyone associated with him because obviously he was the bigger person, you know, the, the more well known person out there doing it. So I'm not sure if it's entirely fair to put that on him. But I know I've read about a long time ago, I can't remember, I feel like there was something like you said, John, where it wasn't quite him that did it, but he also did kind of advance it. And then obviously everybody mocked him for it.

John Dehlin 1:08:36 Okay, so that's a good example to make the point of this slide.

Mike 1:08:39 Yeah. And so as we talked about, when you're redefining words, it's a problem because, you know, we talk about, you know, the past, a foreign country, and all of a sudden now we're redefining words because we don't like what they mean. And I feel like that is a right there, a contradiction. But when you are told we have the plain and precious truths of the gospel and you then have to redefine words, your truth claims have a problem. And so a few examples is translation. We're now told that Joseph Smith might not have actually translated the Book of Mormon, but basically, as Terell Givens has called it, bricolage. Michael Ash calls him a co author with the gold plates. And so now you have this idea that it's a revelation that goes through Joseph's head and Joseph's free to change it however he needs to, to make it make sense to his time, which is not how it was told before. We had all of these errors in the text and all these anachronisms and King James language and all that. And then skin, human skin, we are told, doesn't. Skin, doesn't mean skin. And I just want to point out, if you're watching this, you can see this image on the right. If you're listening, this is an image from the Church's published Book of Mormon children's stories book. And it's a book of three of the Lamanites who just Happen to look just like Native Americans. And it says other people followed another son, Laman. They were called Lamanites. They had dark skins. They're not saying that they, you know, had a. A curse from God that was not their skin. Yeah, nothing.

John Dehlin 1:10:04 Nothing spirit about them, right?

Mike 1:10:06 Yep.

Nemo 1:10:07 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:10:07 That's one of the things they try and do is like, oh, it's not the. The curse wasn't the dark skin. There's the mark of the curse and then there's the curse. And it was more spiritual than it was.

Nemo 1:10:17 You know, it's like, oh, you know, your black skin is just to let people know your curse. It's not the curse, it's itself.

Mike 1:10:22 Yeah, like that makes any better. Yeah. And like it's any difference at all. It's that actually, you know. Yeah, we. We talked about that in our episodes before. But, yeah, the idea that it somehow makes a difference to be like your curses. I'm not talking to you, but to make sure, you know that I'm going to make your skin dark so you're unattractive. And then you're like, that's separate. How. It's the same. You know, that's a word game. That. Again, we talk about word games. And I will say, Daniel C. Peterson wrote the book. Oh, my goodness. I'm going to look it up before I say it. But something about offender. Offenders, for a word, how ladder. How Latter Day Saint critics play word games to attack the church or something like that. And that's the kind of. Yeah, that's the kind of crap you see all the time where you're just like, are you serious? Like you're sorry. You're sitting here telling me that skin doesn't mean skin. And at the same time, you're going to write a book that's basically saying that critics play word games. I want to do this right. Offenders, for a word, how anti Mormons play word games to attack Latter Day. The Latter Day Saints. It's by Daniel C. Peterson and Stephen D. Ricks. And just the title alone, I'm like, really? Daniel Peterson, of all people, is going to write that When Tapia Dan wrote that book. You can't do that. You cannot do that. When you're in a church that says skin doesn't mean skin. I'm sorry, it just does not work.

John Dehlin 1:11:32 Yeah. And just to drive home these other points, like, I remember the first time I heard Spencer Fluman tell some people coming to him with doubts that the Book of Mormon wasn't so much a translation as it was a revelation. And. And there was a whole conference at Utah State University during my final year or two there. You know, it was Bushman, it was Givens, it was Mason, it was, you know, all the top Mormon neo apologists. A whole conference dedicated to what alternative meanings for the word translation might be. Because by 2020, whatever, 2017, 2018, the book of Abraham had been thoroughly debunked as a translation, even though Joseph Smith called it a translation. The Book of Mormon has been thoroughly debunked as a translation. And that's backed Mormon apologists into a corner. What do we do? We've got to use the word. Cause Joseph himself used it. But so how do we redefine the word? So we've talked about skin being redefined as a mark and not the actual curse. New and everlasting covenant. Covenant is a way to describe, you know, the DNC 132. It's not about polygamy. It's not about plural marriage. It's about the new and everlasting covenant,

Nemo 1:12:54 which isn't so everlasting.

John Dehlin 1:12:56 Yeah, it's a problem. Yeah. All right.

Nemo 1:12:59 So they've changed Everlasting as well. Not just the whole phrase, but they've changed the meaning of the word everlasting. It's like. Well, it means God's had it in mind for a while and he still thinks about it. We're just not doing it at the moment.

John Dehlin 1:13:10 Yeah. And also, like, even, like Cumorah. Hill Cumorah. Well, Joseph knew where Hill Cumorah was. It was in upstate New York. But now apologists have moved Hill Cumorah down to Mesoamerica. Or they've created two Hill Cumorahs. I don't know if these are other slides you're going to be covering later, but.

Mike 1:13:27 No, no.

John Dehlin 1:13:28 And also steel. Even though the Book of Mormon mentions steel. I've heard alternative theories for. For what? You know, maybe they meant when they said steel. Maybe they meant Formica or shale or slate or some type of rock. Obsidian. Just really, you know, this. There's too many examples to mention.

Mike 1:13:49 Yeah. One of my favorites was, I believe it was. I think it was the episode you had done long ago on the polygamy essay. And I think Lindsay Hansen Parker, John Hamer said it. I think it was Lindsay Hansen Park. And they were talking about how the church wants to redefine spiritual wifery as, like, this completely separate thing from plural marriage. And we talked about this in our episode, the way spiritual wifery was practiced by John C. Bennett and Joseph's own brother. Really is the same way as plural marriage. The only difference is that you don't have somebody claiming to be sealing you, but it's more or less like you have this spiritual bond. And in the church's essay, one of. I think it's Lindsay Ann's park, she makes this joke where it's like they're trying to say spiritual wifery is horrible, but plural marriage is awesome. And it really is. Like, that's how word games work when you're basically trying to redefine the things you don't like as something horrible and then redefine the things that you're trying to defend as something defensible. And it really does show how word games have been going on ever since the start of the church. It's not like they just started with apologetics in modern day Mormonism.

Nemo 1:14:51 It's like, I'm not lying. I'm withholding the truth for your benefit.

Mike 1:14:54 Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah, it's like carefully worded denials.

John Dehlin 1:14:57 It's not secret. It's confidential.

Nemo 1:15:00 Yes, it's not secret. It's confidential. What's the difference? Perspective.

Mike 1:15:06 It's a point of view. I think he said it's a point of view. It's like, no, it's really not. I mean, there's. Words have meanings. We all know this. And he was a lawyer, so he really knew that. But. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is not anything new. And again, you'll see it in politics, too. It's not unique to religion either. It's just when you start playing these word games where you're like, that doesn't really mean what it means. You're in a space that you're now becoming indistinguishable from fraud. Because now, you know, it can mean whatever you want. Well, skin doesn't mean skin. Well, what? You know. Well, then. Oh, it means a countenance. It's like, no, it doesn't. It didn't mean it then. And so you'll have. People will say, well, if you look up these ancient biblical things, they'll talk about countenance meaning, like, skins. Meaning like skins that you wear. Like, you know, the Native Americans wore skins over their groin, but the church never, ever used it that way. And now we're retrofitting it back in to avoid the explicit racism. And so, long story short, when you're changing words, you're. You're. You're in. You're in trouble.

John Dehlin 1:16:01 All right, well, let's go to the next. I think we've made this point well, let's go to the next slide in the next tactic, which is parallelomania.

Nemo 1:16:11 Yeah.

Mike 1:16:11 And so this is one that kind of goes along with the how could Joseph have known? Kind of trick that we talked about, where we will have something within us that is always looking for parallels. When we're trying to prove something through motivated reasoning. Our minds are like, there's a reason. When you look at the clouds and there's a bunch of really puffy clouds, you can kind of look and see shapes because your mind is always looking for these parallels and for meaning. And so with Mormonism, you'll see apologists will constantly look for parallels in the Book of Mormon or the Book of Abraham or the Book of Moses that link back to ancient times in order to prove that the text truly is of ancient origin, even though, as we've talked about, is littered with 19th century material, ideas, concepts. And so if you look at fair Mormon, they have a page that they call their best evidences for the Book of Mormon. And when you look at some of the specific topics, you really start to see just how they're looking for everywhere for parallels, no matter how flimsy or out of context it might be. Because if you find enough flimsy parallels, all of a sudden it starts to look more robust because all of a sudden you find. I think their top one. I think their list is eight. It's like the top eight evidences. Well, eight's a nice number, but if each one of them is super flimsy, it's not really all that impressive. But it looks impressive the more parallels you can find if they're weak, because it looks like a stronger group that you're pulling from.

John Dehlin 1:17:28 So let's go to the next slide and if you could just give a couple sentence description of each one, because our viewers and listeners won't even know what these are.

Mike 1:17:36 So long records on gold and metal plates. We've covered this in a number of episodes, but they point to the Piergi tablets which we talked about, which are these three tablets that are on metal and they have writings. And so they'll say, see, they had them in ancient times. Well, they were in the old world. And the three tablets contained about 200 words, which means that as we talked about, the Book of Mormon would have needed like a thousand plates to have all the material needed, which we all know is just absurd. Nahom is one. I think we're going to do an episode in the future on this, or at least about some of the Book of Mormon bullseyes. But in the Book of Mormon, they talk about Nahum, and they have found a altar with the letters NHM because they don't have vowels in Hebrew. And so the church is saying, aha. That must be Nahum. There's a book in the Bible called Nahum, N, A, H, U, M. And there are a lot of reasons we'll get into, if we do that episode, why the. The parallel just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense for where the altar was found. But from an apologetic standpoint, they'll say, well, it's in the general area of where the Book of Mormon says we're going. And so it's a really. You have to go into detail to show why it doesn't work. And that's why it's kind of an effective one from an apologetic standpoint, just to throw it out there and just say, yep, see, we got it. But that's a parallel that they're pushing. They're enforcing on it because they're imposing, because NHM does not directly translate to Nahum. There's just no vowels. And human sacrifice in the Book of Abraham. We talked about this in the Book of Abraham episode, but Kerry Mohlstein has written about how there was a human sacrifice that was done at the same time, and therefore Joseph Smith got it right. Dr. Robert Rittner was on Mormon Stories for three episodes for, like, 13 hours. He was one of the world's leading Egyptologists. And he literally just dissects and tells you why this parallel is ridiculous, because Kerry Mohlstein is going to associate, say, death for a cap for punishment for a crime as human sacrifice. So it'd be like us saying that we sacrifice someone if they are put to death for a murder. And that's not obviously what the book Abraham is saying. Elkanah is a God in the Book of Abraham is referred to as El. And so what they're trying to say is that El could mean Elkanah because. But at the same time, as we talk about in those episodes, El is used for a lot of different gods, so it doesn't quite work. Olishem and Ulisum. Olishem is in the Book of Abraham as this field, I think. Or was it Plains of Olishim, I think? And they found this place called Ulisum, and they think because the name is remotely similar, that that must mean that Joseph Smith got it right, even though John Gee in his own video says they're not even looking in the right place. Astrology. In the Book of Abraham, they Say that they got it right. There's an episode that I believe David Bachavoy did with Radio Free Mormon about this and just goes through how Joseph Smith is conflating two different systems of astrology. It's a mess. Highly recommend that. The Book of Enoch. Joseph Smith has parts of the Book of Enoch and when he revises the Bible. And so they'll say that all the parallels from the Book of Enoch match what we now know were in the lost writings of the Book of Enoch. Colby Townsend has done a really awesome job detailing just how many sources were available to Joseph Smith about the Book of Enoch during his time. So he would have had all that information available. Yet from an apologetic standpoint, like, look at these parallels. It's like, no, the parallels are there because he had the source material. And so to finish this slide, this is an issue that cuts both ways. You know, critics of the Church do this sometimes, too, where they'll try to find parallels between, say, Joseph Smith phrasing and, say, the late war. And they'll say, look at that. Joseph Smith was plagiarizing the late war. And as I've said, I don't believe that's the case at all. I think it was just similar writing styles because they're written in the same time frame. So this is something we need to be aware of with whatever we're doing. But a bunch of flimsy parallels do not have the weight that looks. That is perceived when you see a bunch of them being used by apologists to say, oh, my goodness, how could Joseph have known?

Nemo 1:21:37 Is it time for me to admit something?

John Dehlin 1:21:39 Go ahead, Nemo.

Nemo 1:21:40 Well, in. In Hebrew, my name is spelled N, E, H, M, O, and so actually, that alter is to me, there are no vowels. It is to Nihmo. Just so you all know.

John Dehlin 1:21:54 That's. Thank you. That's profound.

Nemo 1:21:57 Sorry. Would you like to say something serious now, John?

John Dehlin 1:21:59 I just could say those past four minutes are just a classic example of how brilliant Mike is. Can you believe he could go through those, you know, those eight points and. Or seven points and just summarize them all so thoroughly and so succinctly and so thoughtfully?

Nemo 1:22:14 It's why I had to say something fatuous, because I couldn't contend with the intellectual might of what he was up to.

Mike 1:22:19 So that's definitely not true. But. No, but those are the things you see a lot. And I guess that's. I mean, I. I could do a lot better, obviously, spend time redirecting. I'm not redirecting.

Nemo 1:22:28 I'm just saying, you look at him deflecting the praise.

John Dehlin 1:22:32 So British.

Mike 1:22:33 Let me put it this way. If you were talking to someone who really, really knows the stuff, like if you go to Dan Vogel and you bring up those Book Abraham things, he can dissect those one by one. And that again, is why you're not going to see John Gee or Kerry Molstein ever, ever have a discussion with anyone who knows what they're talking about. That's why they wouldn't go on with Dr. Robert Riddner. That's why they won't go on with Dan Vogel. Because if you know what you're talking about and you start seeing this crap about how could Joseph have known they can dissect that in front of everybody else and just completely show the game that's being played. And that's why you see them hide behind church sources. And so, yes, I could talk through them to kind of a surface degree. But my point is, if you get to someone who really knows this stuff, it just, it shows how absurd and how deceptive this kind of game about parallels is. And that's why I think it's worth having a few slides on it. And you know, we had talked about Hugh Nibley earlier, and I just want to read this really quick. This is from Kent P. Jackson. He was a BYU professor, I believe, of ancient history. And this is what he says about Hugh Nibley and how he would do parallels. And so he says, Hugh Nibley shows a tendency to gather sources from a variety of cultures all over the ancient world, lump them all together, and then pick and choose the bits and pieces he wants. By selectively including what suits his presuppositions and ignoring what does not, he is able to manufacture an ancient system of religion that is remarkably similar in many ways to our own, precisely what he sets out to demonstrate. In the first place, there are serious problems involved in this kind of methodology. The various religious communities from whose documents Nibley draws his material had mutually exclusive belief in many areas. By removing their ideas from their own context, thus rendering them invalid, and joining them with ideas from other communities similarly removed from their own context, Nibley creates an artificial synthesis that never really existed. The result will be unacceptable and no doubt unrecognizable to any of the original groups. And so, so that paragraph is from a BYU professor, a believer. And it's just pointing out that when you try to create parallels by just grabbing something from here, grabbing something from there, and then say, oh my goodness, look how Joseph got all these 12 points right and you're taking them all out of their original context to mold them, as Kerry Mohlstein would say to your equation. It really not only renders the result meaningless in terms of having strength of argument, but it's doing a disservice to the parallels you're trying to pull from, because it's taking their history and their ancient beliefs and basically remolding it into ours to fit your needs. And so we talk about parallels and parallelomania. Hugh Nibley was one of the ones who did that. And that paragraph from Ken Jackson really shows why that's such a big problem.

Nemo 1:25:16 But there's something beautifully cyclical about that, because Joseph Smith did the same thing with all his surrounding influences. It's exactly what he did. He just took a bit from everything together to make his story work. So Nibley is. Is simply doing what has been done before on other worlds. John. Sorry, I could never apologize.

John Dehlin 1:25:33 I was just gonna say, I. I don't know if, if. I don't know if chiasmus is considered, you know, if it qualifies under the. The title Parallel Lomania, but for me, yeah, that's, that's one of the most significant and outrageously dumb examples of parallelomania within Mormonism. Basically, this. This guy named Jack Welch or John Welch, who's an attorney, who is one of the early founders of. Of Farms, basically found some, some kind of. Some structure of writing prose called chiasmus that is. That is very. That is quite ancient, that is found in a lot of, I don't know, old world writings. And he was able to identify chiasmus in the Book of Mormon and somehow claimed that. That claimed that the Book of Mormon then was of ancient origin. And then later, some, some creative researchers who published, I think, in Dialogue magazine, were able to find chiasmus in Dr. Seuss, you know, and, and if, and if, if the Bible contained a lot of chiasmus, which it does, and Joseph Smith was a, was a, a devotee of reading the Bible, then why wouldn't a chiasmus like patterns show up in whatever Joseph Smith wrote? Because the Bible was probably the book that he read most. Is, Is it okay to call chiasmus an example also of parallelomania? Mike. Or not?

Mike 1:27:07 Yeah, no, I think so. I think if we do an episode on Bullseyes in the Book of Mormon, we want to cover that more because we've talked about it when we did the episodes on kind of the production of it. But yeah, it's absolutely a parallel because you're trying to find parallels to the ancient world. And that's one that we see. And I remember in your episodes with Dr. David Bokvoy, who's a biblical scholar and he used to be a CES instructor, the joke he made, I believe, was it's easy to fake a chiasm. And he wasn't trying to be flippant. He's just trying to say when you're writing material and especially, people kind of forget. And I know Brian Hales is doing a lot more work on this. He's big on polygamy apologetics. He's moved into Book of Mormon authorship apologetics lately. And I know he's really big on the kind of like the complexity of the chiasms of the Book of Mormon, which I think again is also cherry picking, because there's a lot of claimed chiasms and a lot of them are not complex. But a chiasm is typically like, you start with one thing, you go into another part, you go into that main part, then you kind of are going back to the second and then finishing back where you started. It's almost like a five paragraph essay in school.

John Dehlin 1:28:12 It's like A, B, C, B, A, B, A in some sort of pattern, like.

Mike 1:28:16 Yeah. And so imagine you're telling a story and you're like, I needed to go get a loaf of bread and so I needed to rush into the car really quickly. When I got to the store, I realized I forgot that my kid needed to get somewhere for school. So I rushed back to the car to get home and that's what I needed to get the loaf. And that's why I need to get the loaf of bread. I mean, I'm doing it really quickly, but it's just, if you're telling a story orally, it's really helpful to structure it that way because you want to be able to finish the story. And in a lot of ways by finishing it, you have to kind of get back to it in order to kind of finish it, you know, especially when you're doing it in the way Joseph Smith did. So I'm not saying that it would be easy to do the chiasms. I'm just saying it really feels like when you're orally dictating a story, that would be an approach, especially when you're trying to mimic a biblical style of writing. That would happen naturally. And that's how I would do it if I was telling a long story. Because all of a sudden you're, I'll give you. I know we need to Keep moving. I tell my kids stories before bed sometimes, and he would always ask me to make up something. So he'd say, make up a story about my dog having to go find a lost taco. And he eats it and he flies off to the sun with a fart. You know, he was young, actually. It's still funny. But regardless, you would do that because you're trying to remember what you said at the start so it makes sense at the end. And so. So I'm not trying to say that Joseph Smith's chiasms of the Book of Mormon reflect me telling a story about a dog farting. I'm just saying when you're orally telling a story, you're going to have that kind of a pattern. And to then claim it's a bullseye or a parallel to the ancient world is really leaving out a lot of the surrounding context to how Joseph Smith was composing the Book of Mormon.

Stacking the Equation and Straw Man Arguments

John Dehlin 1:29:46 Okay. All right, well, let's go to the next slide then, which is stacking the equation to force the data to give the conclusion.

Nemo 1:29:55 Yeah.

Mike 1:29:55 And this is one I've talked about so many times, which is if you start with the equation the church is true, such as Kerry Mohlstein said at the beginning of this episode, then you're going to force the data to match that conclusion. That's how math works. Mathematical equations are variables, have numbers that are going to give you a conclusion. Well, if the conclusion is fixed, the variables have to change. And so the easiest way to kind of look at how apologists do this is with the Book of Mormon. And since basically Joseph Smith, you know, released it, the church really focuses on telling members it would be impossible for an unlearned farm boy to create a text as long and consistent as the Book of Mormon, including all the names, all the locations. And we talked about that in our episode. When you look at the names, how almost all of them are used just once or twice in the same spot, and then they're forgotten. And that really takes away a lot of the complexity. But, you know, here's a quote from John Taylor. He says, Joseph Smith was uneducated when he was a boy. The Lord took him into his school, and he taught him things. I have seen puzzle many of the wisest scientists, profoundest thinkers, and the most learned men. And so he's basically starting with the equation of Joseph Smith confounds all of these smart people as to how he did it. So, therefore, it's from God. And obviously, we've done. I did an episode on how it could have been composed. It's not that hard to do, or it's not that hard to explain. And elder Mark E. Peterson said, the Book of Mormon is a literary and religious masterpiece and is far beyond even the fondest hopes or abilities of any farm boy. It is a modern revelation from end to end. It is God given. And so, oh, then he says, read, for example, some of the Savior's beautiful sermons in that book. Note that the Lord quotes Bible prophets. Are we to say that the unlearned Joseph Smith had the audacity or the skill to rewrite the Savior's sermons and insert King James passages in them, thinking to improve on what Jesus said? And the answer is yes, I mean, yeah, absolutely, but it just shows how apologists are creating a scenario that just seems too impossible to overcome. But as we talked about, it's actually quite ordinary. You can explain how the Book of Mormon was composed if you actually look at the text, look at what we do have in the accounts, and it absolutely makes perfect sense that Joseph Smith used King James language to lift material from, because that's the only Bible he knew. So Markey Peterson's like, do you really think he'd rewrite it to think he could make it better? It's like, yes, because he's trying to rewrite the King James Bible to make it make sense to someone living in America. So of course he has to make changes. And we talk about the Sermon on the Mount, which we had a whole episode on. Joseph Smith saw something like, say, farthing. And he's like, crap, farthing doesn't mean anything to the Americas. So he changes it to the coinage system in the Book of Mormon that was created just before the Sermon on the Mount, which conveniently enough, gave him the opportunity to make that change. So, yes, that's why he did it. And that's why when you start with the conclusion that the church is true, you're going to do stuff like this to make sure that the equation stays consistent.

Mike 1:32:42 Yeah.

Nemo 1:32:42 And one of the ways they make it overwhelming as well. I don't know if you've seen the video. I did a reaction to it, which is the how could it not be true video, where they go through all these different facts about the Book of Mormon and say, it has to be this, it has to be that. The one that always gets me. It has. It must be 532 pages long. Well, no, it mustn't be. It happens to be based on the size of the typeface and the size of the sheets of paper you're printing it on, and the room that the footnotes take up. But you look at an original copy of the Book of Mormon, say, like this reproduction here, and the number of pages is different. It's got 480, 554, for example. There's loads of variables that the Church tries to say must remain consistent, when in actuality they could be variable.

Nemo 1:33:23 Yeah.

Nemo 1:33:24 So they'll stack it both ways.

Mike 1:33:25 Yeah, yeah. That's the. That's the Hugh Nibley challenge, where you say, could you write this? And John Hamer, I heard him talk about this once. John Hamer is 1 of the 70s of the Church of Christ. He is awesome, super fun to listen to. And he talked about, he's like, I could write a better book than the Book of Mormon. Because he's. I don't know if he's like an official biblical scholar, but he knows the Bible through and through. And so when you set the equation of, well, you have to be an unlearned farm boy. You have to be under the age of, you know, whatever Joseph Smith was, what was he, 20 or whatever when it was done. Well, when you start to do that, you're stacking the equation to get to a fixed point. And that really is what apologetics is all about, is to defend the faith by just making any other conclusion, you know, seem impossible, when in reality it's quite explainable.

John Dehlin 1:34:11 All right, let's go to the next tactic, which is using straw man arguments to slay your opponents. And I assume you want to start by telling us what a straw man argument is. Mike.

Nemo 1:34:22 Yeah.

Mike 1:34:22 So a strawman argument is just basically to reframe someone's argument in a way that they never made it in order to attack it. And so, you know, I'm trying to think of a good example. I don't know if you guys have a good example. I've drawn a blank off top of my head right now.

John Dehlin 1:34:33 You're going to talk about it in a second. But obviously, because we've covered how there was clearly this notion of the mound builder myth that was going around during the time that Joseph Smith came up with the Book of Mormon. And because of the mound builder myth, you can find a lot of the same structural components that we find in the Book of Mormon in other books like the View of the Hebrews. When B.H. roberts and others found those parallels between the View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon, then they said, well, there's a problem. If books that preceded the Book of Mormon share so many parallels like the dark skinned cursing or Native Americans descending from Israelites or whatever it may be. A straw man argument would be to say some critics think that the Book of Mormon was plagiarized from view of the Hebrews. But if you read View of the Hebrews and you read the Book of Mormon, you'll find that the text and the prose, you know, don't bear any similarity. It's clearly not a plagiarism. Well, that's a straw man argument because nobody's arguing that Joseph Smith literally stole text from view of the Hebrews and injected it into the Book of Mormon. But if you can create that false straw man argument that critics claim that the Book of Mormon is plagiarized for view of the Hebrews, then you can knock it down and say it's clearly not plagiarism and you've really done nothing interesting or important there. But maybe you've deceived your gullible, orthodox believing listeners into dismissing, you know, problems, clear problems with the Book of Mormon. Is that okay?

Nemo 1:36:25 Yeah, yeah. Stanley Shook said it's more important that there be an argument that the argument be particularly strong. Right?

John Dehlin 1:36:31 Yeah.

Nemo 1:36:31 And I think one of the easiest ways, if I want to give a bit of a practical advice for recognizing straw man arguments in life and whatnot, would be to when you're having a conversation with someone, ask yourself, are they putting words in my mouth? Because if they're putting words in your mouth, chances are they've created a straw man that seems to resemble your position but is actually a much more extreme version of your position that's much easier for them to attack. So you say, I prefer cats to dogs. Then they come at you and like, why do you hate dogs? You know, Whoa, hang on, that's not what I said. That's a straw man argument. For example, that's a good way to recognize them in your everyday life.

John Dehlin 1:37:06 That's a great example.

Mike 1:37:07 Yeah, that's a good point. And you see a lot of that with, you know, you'll. I'll post something on Twitter about some church thing and they'll reply with something like, you know, like, for example, you might say, I don't believe that there is a God who would separate families because they drink a cup of coffee. Like in Mormonism, they say, oh my goodness, so you don't believe in God and you're just an atheist. I'm like, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I don't believe there's a God that would do that. And so, yeah, to Nemo's point, you read that and you're like, that's not what I said. Show me where I said that. And that is what you see a lot with apologetics, because it's a lot easier to knock down a straw man than it is, as the phrase goes, to knock down a steel man. And a steel man is supposed to be when you're really reframing their argument as it was, as opposed to the way you want to set it up so you can knock it down, a

Nemo 1:37:47 steel man can go even further. You can even strengthen our argument beyond what they presented, if possible. You can give them absolutely every strength and possible opportunity and then go for it and try and take it down.

Mike 1:37:59 Still, that's why I feel not to pat myself on the back, because it's not that. But when we first started the website I had pulled, there was a guy who had done some really cool annotated essays, and I asked him if he could. If I could put them on the website when I was starting. He said yes, because I like that. Because you're starting with their essay, you're starting with their exact wording, exact framing, so that you could then reply to it. And you're not then having to say, well, some apologists have said xyz, you're saying this is literally the text of the essay, and here's why this doesn't make sense. And so to Nemo's point, yeah, I think that you want to give every possible piece of context you can before you try to knock down someone's argument, because otherwise, you know, someone's going to come out and say, that's not even what they said in the first place. You're an idiot. And you'd have no response. And so apologetics are about. They're not always about being deceptive. That's why I said at the start of the episode. But sometimes, and we'll see that in this slide, you do see people who will intentionally try to set this equation with an incorrect framing of people's arguments in order to knock it down for church members who have no idea that they're being deceptive in how they frame it.

John Dehlin 1:38:59 Well, let's jump to the slide.

Nemo 1:39:00 Yeah.

Mike 1:39:01 And so I had written a blog post way back when, like maybe two or three years ago, about Ted Callister, because he wrote the book A Case for the Book of Mormon, and he gives a lot of presentations on why the Book of Mormon must be an ancient, authentic text. And in doing so, he constantly creates these straw man arguments to Tear down critics. And this is an article that he wrote for the Church News. It was on their website, I believe this is from 2021. I have it linked on the website. And he says the initial argument by the critics that the Book of Mormon was man made was based on the premise that Joseph Smith was too unlearned and ignorant to write such a comprehensive work and therefore someone allegedly much more intelligent than he, such as Sidney Rigdon or Oliver Cowdery, must have authored it. Later arguments arose that Joseph copied it from the Solomon Spalding manuscript or that he suffered from a mental disorder that somehow endowed him, an untrained writer, with superior writing skills. These arguments, however, have been so thoroughly discredited that they are seldom mentioned anymore. So the current argument being made is that Joseph Smith was a creative genius who read numerous books such as View of the Hebrews and the Late War between the United States and Great Britain and then copied ideas and stories from them. This of course is a total flip flop, a 180 degree reversal from the original argument that Joseph was incapable, too ignorant to write such a book. Now all of a sudden, Joseph is a skilled creative writer with genius intellect. Why the flip flop? Because all of the previous explanations for a man made book had failed.

Nemo 1:40:32 Which is like what you do when your arguments get disproved. You then look at it a different way. So I don't know why he's getting all funny about the idea that. Okay, people have explored the idea that Joseph Smith was too dumb to do it and someone else did it. That has been disproved.

Mike 1:40:46 It has.

Nemo 1:40:46 So now they're naturally actually going to look at the counterpoint. Well, okay, did we underestimate him? That's just a perfectly reasonable and logical thing to do. Tad. So why are you, why are you getting all assy about it?

Mike 1:40:58 Yeah, did you say assy?

John Dehlin 1:41:01 Rc, spell that for me.

Nemo 1:41:03 A R S E Y.

John Dehlin 1:41:05 A R S E Y. Can you give us the, the definition of that word?

Nemo 1:41:10 Yeah, sure. So if you're being rc, you're being a bit grumpy, you're being a bit intolerable.

John Dehlin 1:41:15 I love it. Rc.

Nemo 1:41:16 Yeah. Rc.

John Dehlin 1:41:17 Thanks, Nemo. All right. Go Mike.

Nemo 1:41:19 Pleasure.

Mike 1:41:20 No, I was just gonna say, you know, this article was written and they could have talked to Dan Vogel, they could have talked to John Hamer, they could have talked to Brent Metcalf. All of these people have really studied and written long length works on how Joseph Smith was pulling stuff for the Book of Mormon, how it could have been composed. You could talk to some Bible scholars Such as, you know, David Bachwell. I know he hasn't written a book on it, but he's talked about some of the things he thinks that Joseph might have done. And yet instead he's going to take this surface level thing where he's throwing out the Spalding manuscript because as Nemo said, yeah, those were talked about by some people, but there are a lot of people today, no one's touching those arguments. And they have much more robust abilities to talk about it because we have more documentation, we have more textual criticism, we have more biblical scholarship to know how it was composed. One of the greatest examples of how Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon comes from the Parable of the Olive Tree. And I've got that on the website. It's in our overview on the composition of the Book of Mormon. We covered it in the episode we did. That one piece tells you how Joseph Smith is pulling material into the Book of Mormon when he's composing it because he kind of confuses his two sources and then at some point kind of forgets and he changes the parable a little bit and you could tell which sources he's pulling from. And that is not something Tad's gonna tell the audience because that would then imply that there's these real arguments. So he wants to make it sound like these are all bumbling idiots just searching for a reason, when in reality there's a lot of great reasons that he's not going to touch because he doesn't want members to know about him. And so if you want to read the full post, it's on the website. It's called Tad Collister, Strawman Slayer, I think. And it goes through his article in a lot more depth. But this is what is done by apologists to reframe the arguments. You don't actually have to give the data as to what they're presenting and instead just give kind of this high level misrepresentation what they're saying so that you want to give the perception to members that they shouldn't even bother reading it.

Nemo 1:43:14 And a phrase I never thought I'd say. But in their defense, maybe not in their defense, but. But I always want to kind of give credit to the reason why people might do things. And of course one of the reasons they're going to have to create straw man arguments is because they don't want to give people the legitimate arguments, the legitimate problems. I thought it was crazy that Kyle S. McKay came so closest to say there are credible reasons to doubt the church, but they'll never quite list what those reasons are. Whenever people talk about, oh, so and so had doubts, you hear it in general conference talk. They had doubts about the church and its history, but they'll never say what those doubts were. Never. So they have to build straw men. The only things they can ever show members of the church are straw men so that they can be easily refuted by the individual. The next sentence, so that members don't lose faith. And that's part of the problem with this sort of intellectual discussion when your primary objective is to make sure that people do not leave the church.

Mike 1:44:08 Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Lying for the Lord and Selective Church History

John Dehlin 1:44:10 All right, let's go to the next one. Lying for the Lord.

Nemo 1:44:13 Yeah.

Mike 1:44:14 And this is one we've talked about in a lot of episodes as well. But, you know, we've talked about how leaders of the church has fabricated stories to promote faith in the church. And in some cases, Joseph Smith and others, excuse me, have outright lied to protect the church and to protect themselves. And with apologetics and kind of this idea of defending the faith, there have been instances where leaders approved of dishonesty, you know, if it was serving the goals and the needs of the Mormon Church. And so this is an address to church educators, basically the church education system by Apostle Boyd K. Packer. And he says church history can be so interesting and so inspiring as to be a powerful tool indeed for building faith. If not properly written or properly taught, it may be a faith destroyer. There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of the church history of church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful. One who chooses to follow the tenets of his profession, regardless of how they may injure the church or destroy the faith of those not ready for advanced history is himself in spiritual jeopardy. If that one is a member of the church, he has broken his covenants and will be accountable. After all the tomorrows of mortality have been finished, he will not stand where he might have stood. And so this is. You know, people think about education as not being apologetics, but when you're in the church system where you're being told you have to promote the faith, you have to defend the church, you are exercising apologetics. And Boyd K. Packer here is saying you are not to teach students any material that might cause them to lose their faith. And if you do, not only is there eternity in jeopardy, but so is yours. And so this is, I don't know what, like apologetics by fiat or something. I'm not sure how I'd phrase that,

Nemo 1:45:57 but it's incredibly heavy handed.

Mike 1:45:59 It is.

Nemo 1:45:59 And it's threatening. It's threatening and it's forcing people where he says, you know, that if not properly written or properly taught, it's this idea that, you know, it's their fault. It's not the problem of church history. If you misinterpret church history and pass that on, that's your fault. And the bit that gets me one who chooses to follow the tenets of his profession, regardless of how they may injure the church or destroy the faith of those not ready for advanced history is himself in spiritual jeopardy. It's almost like, hey, you put the mafia first, you put the church first, you put the family first and then your job. Yep, that's how that comes across to me. And I think, how would it come across to many of those in the room? The idea that, hey, your loyalty is first the church, not to your academic integrity or your professional integrity.

Mike 1:46:44 Yeah. Can you imagine?

Nemo 1:46:46 Yeah, difficult. That's a really difficult position to be in.

John Dehlin 1:46:49 And there are a lot of orthodox believing Mormons that just, it's not in their worldview of possibility that a Mormon apostle or prophet would lie. But you just have to educate yourself. Joseph Smith. The church admits now in its Gospel topics essay on polygamy that Joseph Smith lied to Emma about his practice of polygamy and he lied to the membership of the church, including some of his closest confidants. Flat out lied. The Mormon Church sent polygamous missionaries to the UK to convert British people to Mormonism who were practicing polygamy, who, you know, distributed pamphlets and testified that polygamy was not being practiced in Utah. You know, they, the Mormon church issued the 1890 manifesto where they told the world that they were stopping polygamy forever. And for another 15 years at least, prophets, seers and revelators continued practicing polygamy, performing sealings themselves in Mormon temples and hiding it. Then you've got the secret Mormon meetings of 1922 where the church found out not just about the Book of Abraham problems that were published in the New York Times 10 years prior or earlier, but then started finding out that there were major historical problems with the Book of Mormon. They covered that up and hit it. And you could fast forward to modern day, whether it's the shell companies that were created for Ensign Peak, which was clear outright overt deception and dishonesty. You know, you can go to quotes with Gordon B. Hinckley where if it's not outright lies, he's Misleading when he says things like the polygamy is no longer doctrinal.

Nemo 1:48:49 The.

John Dehlin 1:48:50 You know, to his statement that, that the members of the church are the ones who deserve to know how the tithing is being used. And yet the church knows that they, they've never heard the members of the last people that the church is going to ever let know how the tithing gets used. The Mormon Church.

Nemo 1:49:05 Last time they did was 1959.

John Dehlin 1:49:07 Yeah, yeah, the Mormon Church, top leaders in the Mormon Church have, have been lying in fundamental ways for two centuries. And it's. It's hard to swallow that pill. It's hard to believe that they would do it. And yet the evidence is time and time and time and time again, they do flat out lie to the membership and to the world. Should we go to the next slide, Mike? Yeah. All right, so let's go to the next slide.

Mike 1:49:35 And so obviously the last one, Boyd Packer, is a little older. So this is Russell Ballard's 2016 address to CES instructors. And, you know, I want to just say off the bat, we all can speculate as to how much leaders know, because we don't really know how much of the history they truly know, but they do continue to tell CES instructors today that their responsibility is to maintain faith in the church for the youth. And so this is a clip from Elder Ballard's address to CES instructors in 2016. And before we play it, the clip's a little longer than this quote. I just want to highlight this one part. So he says, through your diligent effort to learn by study and faith, you'll be able to help your students learn the skills and attitudes necessary to distinguish between reliable information that will lift them up in the half truths and incorrect interpretations of doctrine, history, and practices that will bring them down, teach them about the challenges they will face when relying on the Internet to answer questions of eternal significance. Remind them that James did not say, if you lack wisdom, let him Google. And this is, again, this is apologetics that you're training your employers to do because you are taking church educators who have background in academics, and you're telling them, leave that at the door. You are now property of the church and you are now to teach them faith promoting material, whether or whether or not it's factually defensible.

John Dehlin 1:50:56 Yeah, Nemo, anything you want to add there or do we want to play the episode?

Nemo 1:50:59 Roll the clip.

Mike 1:51:00 Yeah, you can roll the clip.

John Dehlin 1:51:01 Let's roll the clip.

Nemo 1:51:04 Additionally, more than at any time in our history, your students also need to be blessed by learning doctrinal or historical content and context by study and faith, accompanied by pure testimony so they can experience a mature, lasting conversion to the Gospel and a lifelong commitment to Jesus Christ. Mature and lasting conversion means they will stay in the boat and hold on throughout their entire lives. For you to understand the doctrinal and historical content and context of the Scriptures and our history, you will need to study from the best books as the Lord directed. The best books include the Scriptures, the teaching of modern prophets, the apostles, and the best LDS scholarship available. Through your diligent effort to learn by study and faith, you will be able to help your students learn the skills and attitudes necessary to distinguish between reliable information that will lift them up and the half truths and incorrect interpretations of doctrinal history and practices that will bring them down. Teach them about the challenges they face when relying upon the Internet to answer questions of eternal significance. Remind them that James did not say if you had lack wisdom, let him Google

John Dehlin 1:52:55 Nemo. What's what's wrong with that? Excerpt from From Elder Ballard Some it's

Nemo 1:53:02 one of those weird ones where some of it sounds fine. Like the idea that you should actually teach them how to discern between the truth and half truths. And deceptively that at face value is a call to teach them good academic skills. But you know that's not what he's saying because the broader context is demonizing Google and is saying that the the only acceptable sources are good LDS scholarship, the words of apostles prophets. So instantly you've got a bias there that he's introduced. So he's not encouraging them to be taught good academic skills. So really then he caps it all off with essentially what we all think we've all been saying is implicit in the teachings of prophets by making it explicit. Do not Google this stuff. Do not go to Google for answers to these questions. Don't go there. Keep it in house. Yeah, where they control the narrative.

John Dehlin 1:53:54 Totally. Mike, you want to add anything?

Mike 1:53:57 No, I think we've covered that one pretty good. It's just like I said, it's just, it's. It's again, it's taking having leaders of the church telling people with academic backgrounds that your job is not to teach your academic background, it's to teach basically apologetics. Because whether or not we want to label the Church's educational system as an apologetic source, it ultimately is. Especially when you're telling people do not use sources outside of what we give you that at that point you're now kneecapping any even premise that you're trying to be academically historically accurate.

John Dehlin 1:54:26 And I'll just add that hiding the truth is a form of lying. And by the way, I learned that from the Mormon Church. But, you know, the classic example of this that we've referred to is Joseph Fielding Smith discovering the 1832 version of the Joseph Smith's first Vision account, realizing how inconvenient and faith destroying that might be. And so he rips that version of the first vision account out of Joseph Smith's own notebook or journal and hides it for a few decades until the Tanners column on it. And then he just secretly tapes it and sticks it back in. And, you know, the Church has been hiding its factual history for centuries, including shutting down the Leonard Arrington administration, which was, you know, trying to share factual church history from 1972 to 1982, etc. And then I'll also say intimidating or silencing or excommunicating historians and truth tellers like they did with the September six is another way of lying, because it's intimidating and threatening and silencing historians from telling the truth so that your. Your followers either won't trust them, won't listen to them because they've been smeared and maligned and discredited through excommunication or by just striking fear in everybody's hearts to learn anything that they might be teaching, because after all, they're apostates. For me, all of that is a form of lying or hiding or intimidating or deceiving in addition to advancing knowingly disingenuous apologetics, because the Church knows better than to allow people like Daniel Peterson, you know, Hugh Nibley, et cetera, to advance shoddy disingenuous apologetics. And. And for me, all of that are different shades of lying. And maybe Mike and Nemo, you might think I'm taking that too far, but I think they know better.

Mike 1:56:36 I think most of them do. Yeah, I mean, I certainly think they know better.

Nemo 1:56:39 Yeah, they're purposely poisoning the well and adding it into the already entrenched us versus them narrative within Mormonism. So they're just, again, pushing people to say, look, those that aren't us, let's poison the world against what they have to say.

John Dehlin 1:56:52 Yeah. All right, let's go to the next slide. Speaking, Acting as a man, giving Joseph a break.

Deflection Tactics and Ad Hominem Attacks

Mike 1:56:58 Yeah, this is just one. You know, sometimes it's kind of made fun of when you're. When you leave the Church, because you hear this a lot, and it really is designed to excuse problems with the truth claims and more Importantly, to excuse terrible behavior. And every time, I should say, oftentimes when you point out something that Joseph Smith said or did that was awful, I'll be told that Joseph Smith was acting as a man and that if Joseph Smith was perfect, how could you ever hope to be good enough to, you know, to get through in the eyes of God? And this led to Neil L. Anderson stating the following at the 2015 General Conference. He says to those of faith who, looking through the colored glasses of the 21st century, honestly question events or statements of the prophet Joseph from nearly 200 years ago. May I share some friendly advice? For now, give Brother Joseph a break. And it's just one of those lines. It's so depressing because it's effective, because I've talked to people who will literally say, because they believe your identity is tied to the church, that if you question Joseph Smith for doing the things he did, then basically you're questioning yourself. Because if God uses imperfect vessels to get his word out, so if you, you know, if Joseph was perfect, we'd have no chance. And I just, I hate it because it's an apologetic that really strikes at your identity just as much as it strikes at the, you know, the history of, of the problems in the church

Nemo 1:58:17 also. And of all the people you shouldn't be just giving a break to. It's the man whose claims and restoration of the gospel underpin the entire of your religious experience. You know, he is the USP of Mormonism. He is the unique selling point. He is the thing that makes Mormonism different. He was the first of the modern day prophets. He restored what Mormonism is. So he's the one you should actually be analyzing the most. And God would know that. God would know that the validity and the chances of people joining his church rest upon the person he chose to be the leader of it first. The first guy, particularly if it's that guy's revelations that are going to form the backbone of the extended canon of Mormon scripture. In the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham and Doctrine and Covenants. No other prophet has been quoted as much in canonized scripture. So of course he's going to be under the microscope. God should have known that. And so he shouldn't have chosen someone who is willing to do all the things that Joseph Smith did.

John Dehlin 1:59:19 Really, they kind of want it both ways. When they want you to believe in absolute terms to give your life to the church, to give your money, they'll say, we have prophets. The restoration has happened. God speaks to prophets. Joseph Smith prays to the man we believe in, Joseph Smith, we follow him. He's the greatest man to ever walk the face of the earth, except Jesus. They want that. But then they also, you know, once you say, wait a minute, didn't he act like a sexual predator? Didn't he act like a charlatan? Didn't he act like a fraud? Aren't all of his scriptures problematic? Aren't there? You know, you look at all these quotes from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and others, and then they want to say, well, well, well, well, well, these are just men. They're doing the best they can. They want it both ways. And they want to eat their cake

Nemo 2:00:08 and have it, too.

John Dehlin 2:00:09 Yeah, they want to eat their cake and have it, too.

Mike 2:00:11 That's true. It's the whole thing. Like, Adam, God, right? So Brigham Young taught that Adam was our God. He put it in the Mormon Temple ceremony, which we're told is directly from God. And yet at the same time, you've got all the apostles of the church looking at their watch. They're like, come on, come on. And they're like, he's dead, right? He's dead, Adam. God's gone. We're done with that. You know, it's just the moment a prophet or a leader dies, all of a sudden we're like, you don't need to really focus too much on what they're saying. But as they're alive, you are told to treat everything they say as if it's coming directly from God. And that is the game the church plays to try to have it both ways. And it really is one. That's horrible because I said it strikes at your identity. It's not just a historical issue. It's you're coming at it and saying that you are a member of the church. This is what you need to do. And if you're not doing it, you're failing in the eyes of God, because now you're judging them and you think, you know, it's a clip we showed in our previous episode. The church historian Kyle McKay is like, do you think you could do better? It's like, yes. And as Nemo said, yeah, God, the God of Mormonism, picked a really crappy person to lead the church. He picked an even crappier person to be the second person to lead the church. And so I'm not saying Joseph Smith was an absolute monster, but he did a lot of things that qualify as well. As we talked about fraud, grooming, sexual predator. You know, I'm not saying pedophile. I Don't think it's a pedophile. But all these other things are true. They're textbook. And so to now say, well, he was just a man, it's like. But ultimately there's got to be. The buck's got to stop with someone. And as Nemo said, God of Mormonism kind of dropped the ball on this one. I feel like I'm ranting. I'm sorry for that.

John Dehlin 2:01:41 No worries. Let's go to the next slide.

Nemo 2:01:44 Yeah.

Mike 2:01:45 And so this is just really quickly. I just picked four quick quotes about, you know, things that prophets said. And now we have to say, were they speaking as prophets or as men? And so Oliver B. Huntington wrote the following declaration from Joseph Smith. This will sound familiar to some of you out there. The inhabitants of the moon are more of a uniform size than the inhabitants of the earth. Being about 6ft in height, they dress very much like the Quaker style and are quite general in style or the one fashion of dress. They live to be very old, coming generally near a thousand years. This is the description of them as given by Joseph the Seer, and he could see whatever he asked the Father in the name of Jesus to see. In other words, they're saying Jesus, Joseph Smith is saying that he got this through God and not just by his speculation. Brigham Young said, so it is with. So it is. With regard to the inhabitants of the sun, do you think it is inhabited? I rather think it is. Do you think there is any life there? No question of it. It was not made in vain. Joseph Fielding Smith. We will never get a man into space. This Earth is man's sphere, and it was never intended that he should get away from it. The Moon is a superior planet to the Earth, and it was never intended that man should go there. You can write it down in your books that this will never happen. Spencer W. Kimball the Native Americans are not Orientals. They are from the Near East. It is not impossible that they could have seeped across the Bering Strait. A little Oriental blood is claimed by some people. But basically these Lamanites, including the Indian, are the descendants of Lehi, who left Jerusalem 600 years B.C.

John Dehlin 2:03:14 yeah, and those are, you know, in some sense, those are kind of silly things. But how about the Church teaching LGBT people that they should engage in conversion therapy for decades, which led to so many deaths by suicide and depression? Or telling LGBT people that they should be celibate or that they should marry? Mixed orientation marriages, which not only devastated generations of marriages, but also affected the children who were born into those mixed Orientation marriages, you know, the. Or teaching generations of Lamanites or Native Americans or African Americans that their skin was dark as the result of cursings, or teaching generations of young men and women that masturbation is evil. Like, it's one thing to talk about silly predictions about people going to the moon, but when you think about the money and the time and the reputation and the epidemic of depression and anxiety and even suicidality based on some of the most harmful doctrines and teachings, for me, that's when this stuff gets really serious. And that's why we can't give Joseph a break and hold modern day prophets to a lower standard because they're just men. It's because, again, with extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But when there's extraordinary power and extraordinary influence and potentially extraordinary deleterious impact on the lives of literally millions of people, the scrutiny and the bar and the standard should be higher, not equal to your average Joe man on the street, as far as I'm concerned.

Mike 2:04:57 No, you're 100% right. And polygamy is a great example. You know, you have people who will say that Joseph Smith was acting as a man with polygamy. That's why he made all those mistakes. And those had real world implications that impacted a lot of lives, especially of these young teenage girls, their families. And you know, the reality is they're always saying, well, they were speaking as a man speaking as a prophet. If the prophet doesn't know if they're speaking as a prophet or as a man, then you can't trust anything they say. And so if you want to say Joseph Smith was speaking as a man when he was telling some of these young girls that if they didn't marry him, the gates would be closed forever, or that this is how they get exaltation. Well, then how do you believe anything else was from him when almost as we discussed in our previous episodes, a lot of the things he brought forward ultimately were to benefit either himself or his authority in the church. And so all of these decisions made by past prophets have implications to today. And so, as you said, I did pick out some silly ones just to show kind of how absurd the argument is. But yeah, these are things that impact us today. Dallin Oaks oversaw electroshock therapy at byu. He is likely to be the next prophet. What do you do with that? You know, and so these are problems that come from us not knowing if they're speaking as prophets or as men and them not knowing it.

Nemo 2:06:06 He told me personally that he didn't lie. Well, no public study had found that he didn't buy. So, yeah, maybe that's fine then. But I think. I think the problem with this, and the only logical line you can really draw, is that if they are speaking in their official capacity as a leader in the LDS Church, at any official event, they're suited and booted. They're talking to a congregation. They represent the church. They should only say things that they can say come from God because they claim to speak for God. That is all. They should be speaking publicly. They can write what they want in their journals. They can say what they want around the dinner table at home. You know, I'm not about to go diving into their journals or their small audiences, but when they're speaking in official capacity, it better hold up. But I think on the next slide, you're about to point that Sherry Dew disagrees, right?

Mike 2:06:58 Yeah.

Nemo 2:06:59 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:06:59 Let's show it.

Mike 2:07:01 Yeah. And so this is an interesting one because John actually brought this to my attention yesterday night. So I was happy to add this in. And oftentimes when leaders and prophets of the Mormon Church, you know, just simply get it wrong, the current leaders quickly declare it's okay because they were just speaking as men. And as we've said, the problem with apologetics is that you'll never hear them make that argument about current leaders, because we are to believe that every word they say has a power we cannot have for ourselves. And don't take my word for it. Here is Sherry Du. Just three weeks ago, during a talk at the BYU Women's Conference, she says now a few words about prophets. I declare without reservation that the most important words being spoken on Earth today are those from prophets, seers and revelators. Some of their words are to worldwide congregations and others to an audience of one or two, but their words always have power. And so how do you reconcile that with being told that we need to know when prophets are speaking as a prophet versus speaking as a man? When you're told that every word they say has power and they don't always

Nemo 2:07:59 have power, or they certainly don't always have the same amount of power or value, according to Alan D. Haney from the last General Conference, because I've got his quote here from the April 2023 LDS General Conference. He said, unlike vintage comic books and classic cars, prophetic teachings do not become more valuable with age. That is why we should not seek to use the words of past prophets to dismiss the teachings of living prophets. So he's echoing something that Ezra Taf Pence had already said in his 14 Fundamentals of Following the Prophet, which is a living prophet is more important than a dead prophet. So that's to your point, Mike. We have to listen to what the living prophet says and he can't err, he can't get things wrong. We have to follow every single word of his. But once he's dead, his words are not important as the next living prophet. So it begs the question, why should I listen now if it could just be undermined or thrown under the bus by the next guy?

John Dehlin 2:08:53 Yep. All right, should we go to the next slide?

Mike 2:08:58 Yeah, let's go to the next one.

John Dehlin 2:08:59 All right, let's do it.

Mike 2:09:00 This is one again. We've said, I've said so many times about how when you're making apologetic arguments, you have to be consistent. When you think you're solving one problem, you have to address what you're going to create in other areas of study. And so Fairmormon has actually used this quote, I want to say, when attacking critics of the Church. They say, when critics need an attack against the Church, any excuse will do. Even if they are mutually self contradictory, if one argument is true, the other cannot be. And I just, I feel like this is a really ironic statement because we've tried to outline through these episodes that the apologetics used by the Church to make the truth claims become even remotely plausible always are going to open up problems in other areas that cannot be reconciled. In other words, they'll use a parallel to prove the Book of Mormon could be true, even if that parallel is going to prove other areas of the Church's truth claims false. We see that when we talked about DNA, the Book of Mormon translation, especially think of tight versus Loose, the Book of Abraham, polygamy, the dnc, and so many of these other areas where his productions are so inconsistent that if you want to try to solve the problem by giving it a certain apologetic, it's going to ultimately create problems elsewhere. And that's why apologists are always trying to do targeted strikes as opposed to taking a step back and looking at all of this, you know, from that kind of like total view. And I just, I find it kind of funny that fair Mormon is going to use this line of attack when that's exactly what they do as well.

Nemo 2:10:24 Hypocrisy of the highest order. Definitely. I can't say any more than that.

John Dehlin 2:10:31 So I'm in a. I'm in a. Now that we're kind of coming up to some summation slides, I am going to mention what, what I think is one of the historical major flaws with Mormon apologetics that we really didn't give, I think, maybe enough attention to, which is the history of, of what is called ad hominem attacks, where instead of attacking the argument, you attack the critic. And one thing, you know, starting with Hugh Nibley when he had to write a response to Fawn Brody and, you know, to her book no Man Knows My History, he writes a really snarky, insulting pamphlet called no ma' Am that's Not History to Daniel Peterson and Lou Midgley and, and his ilk, you know, calling Brett Metcalf a butthead and even publishing that in a weird, archaic way in one of their journals to ways that they've attacked people like me and Simon Southerton and, and Jeremy Runnels and other critics and now even using, you know, independently finance critics like Midnight Mormons or others to personally smear, you know, critics of the church in modern day. For me, one of the biggest problems historically of Mormon apologetics is that they have focused much more on smearing the critics and the truth tellers. You know, even calling, you know, you know, focusing on Michael Quinn's homosexuality instead of on his, his really legitimate scholarship that there's just way too many examples to mention. But I am, I'm a tiny bit curious, Mike, why you didn't have, you know, a section on ad hominem attacks. And the only reason I can maybe think about why is that. One of the things we also haven't mentioned is is that Mormon Apologetics 1.0 has in effect been. Been sort of demoted or extinguished by the modern Mormon Church. You can see that FARMS is pretty much no more, that the Maxwell Institute is unraveling and is pretty much no longer relevant. Daniel Peterson is really no longer relevant. And the church is investing less and less in fair Mormon as it promotes the Gospel topics essays. And for me, what that is is an admission that old school Mormon apologetics has not only not succeeded, but in my experience, classic Mormon apologetics has actually accelerated people's disaffection from Mormonism. Because when critics like me or Jeremy Runnels or Brett Metcalf or Michael Quinn or others, Fawn Brody, provide credible attacks of the church, critiques of the church, and then Mormon apologists respond by saying, well, Fawn Brody was a lesbian. You know what I mean? When they give stupid, irrelevant, meaningless ad hominem attacks as their best responses, a smart inquisitor is going to conclude that the church really has no good arguments at all. And so I will just. I do want to put on the record this, this approach of ad hominem attacks as being a key piece of classic Mormon apologetic playbook. And just the acknowledgement that I think the church now realizes that that's a failed strategy or a failed tactic. And so may, may, may Mormon apologetic ad hominem attacks rest in peace. Mike, do you want to add anything to that?

Mike 2:14:28 I think that's fair. I mean, I, the reason I didn't add it is because when I was doing this part of the overview, I was more thinking about all the apologetics I'd worked with in the previous topics, so Gospel topics essays, Fair Mormon, and some of the talks from church leaders. So I wasn't. You don't see a lot of ad hominem in especially in modern day material like none of the gospel topics essays really have ad hominem attacks. And so it was more or less that it just didn't really come on my radar when I was doing that. And I think to your point, the ad hominem attacks from a more high level mainstream are just not really there as much anymore. But you do see it a lot in the trenches. You see if you read replies or you listen to other podcasts from more faithful sources, or if you go into the hellscape that is Twitter, you see a lot of ad hominem. For example, if you see something that comes up and it's someone linking to CS letter, they'll immediately just mock it because CS letters can't trust any of that. But yeah, so it's a really fair thing to bring up. And I think it's an important thing to bring up. And again, I would note that that's something that's important for all of us to keep in mind. If you, you know, here an article is by Kerry Mohlstein or John Gee, my first response is like, ugh, you know that what they've done in the past is crap, but you can't just dismiss it because they did it. You still got to look at it and assess it for what it says as opposed to the person that wrote it or the person that kind of is presenting it. And so yeah, I didn't bring it up just because it really wasn't on my radar from the earlier stuff. But it does need to be mentioned because that is a tactic you see in religion and politics where you're just trying to poison the well by saying it's done by so and so. You can't trust what they say. Therefore everything that they're putting forth, no matter how well sourced it is, we can't rely on, which is simply not how it works.

Nemo 2:16:12 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:16:12 And I guess I'll add. Nemo, I want to get you in on this, but excommunicating a historian or a critic in some ways is the best way to invoke the ad hominem argument. Because if you don't like an accurate criticism they make or even an accurate historical tidbit that they advance, you excommunicate them, which then ruins their reputation because now they're an apostate. And then you can make sure that members don't pay attention to anything that they have to say. So, in a sense, excommunication is a form of ad hominem in a way. Nemo, anything you want to add to this part of the discussion?

Nemo 2:16:49 I feel that. I feel that ad hominem is a very effective form of poisoning the well when it comes to the LDS Church because members are taught to discern the truth of things by their feelings. And one of the ways to make people feel badly towards those who may give them truthful information that contradicts the mainstream LDS narrative is to have them excommunicated or to just generally say mean things about them or just to, you know, that's a very emotionally charged way of attacking someone. Which resonates then with members who need to be disabused of the idea this person might have something good to say.

Nemo 2:17:24 Yeah.

Gaslighting and Why Apologetics Can Be Harmful

John Dehlin 2:17:25 All right, let's go ahead and go to the next slide, which quotes the amazing John Hamer.

Mike 2:17:31 Yeah, and I mentioned him earlier in this episode. I mentioned in previous ones. He's awesome. And I don't know him personally, but just from listening to. To some of the podcasts he's done with. With John and with Infants on Thrones. He's a historian of Mormonism. He's 1 of the 70s of the Church of Christ. And he was doing. I think this is from a Reddit ama. And I think someone was asking him about what he thought about the apologetics of Fair Mormon. And he said, this is what he said about apologetics. He said, generally, you can avoid saying, well, this is a forest. If you spend all your time staring at bark through a microscope and telling yourself that the pattern in bark is similar to the pattern in an elephant's hide. And I love it because it really paints that picture of summing up the way apologists approach differing problems of Mormonism by telling you that what you're looking at isn't what you think it is, because you need to drill deeper to the point where you're completely losing sight of all context surrounding it. And to kind of piggyback, there's a great quote from Dan Vogel from his recent book about Book of Abraham apologetics, and he said the following. Defenders of Smith's Abraham try to overcome the evidence that it's not a correct translation and is riddled with errors by proposing demonstrably implausible, factually erroneous theories. Weak, nonsensical parallels should never be used to justify patently incorrect conclusions. History deserves better. And I love that one because it also ties into our earlier slides about kind of finding parallels. Like, just to say that finding weak parallels does not overcome solid evidence that tells you your truth claims are not true. And so those two quotes I just really like, because it really shows the absurdity of some of the apologetics we see within Mormonism, especially when you're using apologetics and not really addressing really solid, concrete evidence that we have that these claims just don't hold up.

John Dehlin 2:19:12 Yeah. Another way of saying it is, is that Mormon apologetics is gaslighting because it's basically, when there are credible, legitimate problems, it's creating smoke screens to create the impression that there are no problems. When it's. It's factual that there are significant problems.

Nemo 2:19:31 I think it.

John Dehlin 2:19:32 Yeah.

Nemo 2:19:33 In a detailed way, the way that it's gaslighting, it's convincing you that the thing you thought was the LDS narrative narrative is no longer the LDS narrative. And you were wrong all along. You actually, you actually should have been looking at it this way. That's how I think specifically that. That it is a form of gaslighting.

John Dehlin 2:19:49 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if. And if we just go back to this analogy of you've got a used car where, you know the transmission's broken, you know that one of the pistons is not firing, you know that the car is a lemon and it's only going to last a year or two. What's the honest, ethical thing to do if you're going to try and sell the car? It's to. It's. It's informed consent. It's to give the buyer all the information so that they know exactly what they're buying and they can make an informed decision. This is the core value statement or mission of Mormon Stories podcast. It's why we do what we do. We believe that people, if they're going to base their entire lives around a religious worldview, they deserve to have all the information. And if the Mormon Church lived the honesty that it teaches and that it claims, you know, to. To practice or follow, it would not just. It would certainly not hide information and punish people who talked about it. And it wouldn't even do what it does now, which is provide this spin to try and spin away and gaslight the narrative they would tell everybody. Listen, this is what we teach as the factual history. Here are the problems that people are finding with it. Now that you know the history and all the problems, you. You can make an informed decision about whether or not you want to join. That would be the ethical, honest thing to do. But it's obviously something that religions will probably never do.

Mike 2:21:25 No, yeah, no, I mean, I've said

Nemo 2:21:28 before, because getting them to buy the car is the most important thing.

Mike 2:21:30 That's just it. You get them in the car, and then once you're in the car, everything else kicks in as far as the sun costs. And, you know, milk before me is a really attractive way to keep people in a religion, because if you keep layering it on, slowly you get to a point, it's like the frog in the boiling water, where you're like, well, I can't leave now. I'm already too far in. And, yeah, that's right. If they believe their truth claims, every general conference, they would say, a lot of people say our claims aren't true. I want you to go out there, I want you to investigate this both from our own sources and from other sources, and you will find out that we hold up and you hear the opposite. And I think that's all you need to know.

John Dehlin 2:22:01 Yeah. All right, let's go to the next slide.

Mike 2:22:03 And this is just for me to kind of, as we start to sum up why apologetics can be harmful. And they bother me a lot because they are designed to defend the church's truth claims no matter what the evidence tells us. And there is a reason why so many apologists eventually leave the church, because at some point, the evidence simply does not hold up. We've covered that. This is like 40 some episodes. And if you, at this point, don't believe that there's compelling evidence, I don't know what to tell you. But that's the reason why the best critics start out as apologists. Because you're trying to hold on to something for so long, and then you finally something snaps and you go, oh, my goodness, what have I been defending? And, you know, as I said at the beginning, on the flip side, you have some apologists who defend the faith almost like it's more of a sports game than it is a true search for truth. And it's more about scoring points against the others at the expense of real scholarship and open debate. That does go both ways as well. And so just to say that's not true for every apologist, there are some apologists that I have no doubt I could sit down and have lunch with and just hang out with and have a great time. I'm not saying that they're all trying to be dishonest, because I don't even know that they necessarily think they are. But we see throughout the church's history where the lines get blurred between trying to seek truth and also trying to destroy any perceived threats to keep members believing. That's kind of what we talked about with the ad hominem, and that can impact the relationships of those who leave the church in real tangible ways, especially when you have people saying that those who leave and speak out are somehow bad people. And I can just tell you, you know, from being in, you know, having family that are in the church, they do look at you differently, especially when you do get the courage to speak out a little bit. And when you have apologists that are trying to pile on against what you're saying, especially when it's using deceptive sources or straw man arguments, it just makes that worse. And so that's why I feel like apologetics can be very harmful, because most of the people they're speaking to don't know better.

John Dehlin 2:23:57 And I love it that you. You have a clip of Bart Ehrman as your next slide. We've had Bart Ehrman, New Testament Scholar on Mormon Stories podcast. I'll refer you all to that episode to learn more about Bart Ehrman. But you've got a clip of him summarizing the problem with apologetics quite well.

Mike 2:24:15 Yeah. And this one I love, and this is from a debate he had done, I want to say, last month, so in April or May of 2023. And it's with Justin Bass, and it's a debate about the resurrection of Jesus. And I think the reason I came across it is someone had sent it to me or I saw it somewhere, because Bart Ehrman actually brings up Mormonism quite a bit during the debate, basically to talk about the reliability of witnesses. And that is not necessarily relevant to this clip, but at the end of the debate, Barth's talking about what his problems are with apologetics when it comes to religion and why it can both be disingenuous and problematic. And I think it applies so well to what we see within Mormon apologetics. And it really does focus on the idea that you're using your academic credentials to push theology, and you're doing so without letting the audience in on that. And so they don't know any better, and they think that you're using academics to push academics. And so that, I think, is where I really like this clip. And so we could play it. And Bart Ehrman obviously does a much better job explaining that.

John Dehlin 2:25:17 All right, let's roll the clip.

Mike 2:25:19 Final thought.

Mike 2:25:20 Yeah. I think that the. I think the big issue in. In Christian apologetics is that apologists are doing theology claiming to do history. And I have no trouble with people doing theology. I have no trouble with people believing Jesus was raised from the dead. History is actually two things, and I think apologists tend to get it confused. I think that's what's going on here. The two things are history, in one sense, is anything that happened in the past. The other sense, that history, the term of the way historians use history, is what you can establish as having happened in the past. Past where you have evidence. And for that you need historical argument. You can't have religious arguments. You have to have historical arguments, just like you can't have mathematical arguments to prove philosophy or you can't have philosophical arguments. There are different realms of discourse, and theology and history are different realms of discourse. If you pretend you're doing history when in fact you're doing theology, I just don't think it's right. And you're trying to convince people because they don't know, and they sound. Oh, that sounds like it's history. No, it is not history. To claim that. That. That something is historical requires a critical evaluation of all the sources and all the information and to establish levels of probability. It isn't simply to tell people what they want to hear and say, here's my evidence for it. Right.

John Dehlin 2:26:38 Wow, that's kind of a. It's kind of a mic drop. And it's so applicable to what we're talking about.

Nemo 2:26:43 Yeah, I don't want to follow it. Yeah, follow that guy.

John Dehlin 2:26:49 All right. Yeah. And that's. That's just it. When. When you use academics, when you use PhDs, when they're bankrolled by the church, when they're employed by the church, and then you're using their. Their degrees and their reputation and their authority to make what. What. What turns out to be emotional or unverifiable claims, it's just dishonest. There's just no way around it. All right, so let's do this concluding slide.

Final Reflections on Mormon Apologetics

Mike 2:27:21 Yeah. And it's just to say, you know, one of the things I've been trying to say throughout this episode is that apologetics by themselves are not inherently bad, they're not inherently awful, but how they're used can be. And in almost every episode of this of the series we've done, we've discussed the apologetic responses, both directly from the church, through their leaders and their gospel topics essays. And we've also looked through some of the groups that are kind of indirectly supported by the church, such as Fair Mormon, Book of Mormon central. And just to kind of piggyback off what Bart Ehrman said, the problem I have with apologetics is that oftentimes in the church, those making those arguments know much more than they're telling the audience. Because the goal of apologetics within Mormonism is not to give informed consent to the members of the church, but to keep them as active members by only giving them the part of the story that's going to promote faith. And they're doing all of that while using academic credentials as an appeal to authority. And so, kind of like Dr. Ehrman was saying, when Kerry Mohlstein gets up in front of an audience for a fireside or he writes an article for the church in their magazines and he talks about these Egyptian parallels, he's not telling him that the probability of that being, you know, making it a hit for the Book of Abraham is maybe less than one tenth of a percent. He's making it sound like it's a direct hit. He's not telling him that we have almost 100% certainty that he translated wrong, that we have the source material for the first part of the Book of Abraham. And so because he's not letting the audience in on the information he has while giving them the impression that he's doing it, I feel like that's where it goes from being kind of like a good intention thing to a deceptive approach in order to achieve your goal of keeping members in the church, even by letting them think that you're giving them information from an Egyptian Egyptologist background instead of a theological or church funded background. And so, you know, just for me to conclude if Mormonism was truly about simply restoring plain and precious truths, it just seems odd to me that apologists are needed on almost every issue within the church, while critical arguments are the ones that are pretty much very straightforward in pointing out the problems and giving you the evidence. And to me, that's really a pretty clear indicator that these claims can simply not hold up on their own. Obviously, you're gonna need apologetics. Even if the church was true, you would still need people out there to explain why there's misconceptions. But when you have every issue with problems that need to be twisted up all over the place just to get them to be plausible, I think that's a really good indicator that these are not plain and precious truths whatsoever and that apologetics are not being used to get to the truth, but just to get you to stay.

Nemo 2:29:52 I love that. And I'd love to go off what Bart Ehrman said, where he talks about when you're claiming to do history, but you're actually doing theology, it's the same as the church historian. He's claiming to do history. He's actually doing lawyer work. You know, he's. He's actually doing apologetics, like what you said about hiding behind their credentials. What you've got is Kerry Muhlstein pretending or professing to do Egyptology when in fact he's doing theology or he's doing apologetic work. And that sort of dishonesty, which it is, it's dishonesty when you're professing that, that it needs to stop because it's not acceptable within the rules of Mormonism, even if it's in defense of the faith.

John Dehlin 2:30:30 And, and we've talked about this before, but one of the most damning things, I think one of the most damning, damning evidences against Mormonism is that for the past several church historians, church historians, the Mormon Church has chosen lawyers to be the official church historians, not historians. The last time they had a historian serve an actual historian, a credentialed, reputable historian serve as church historian, ended in 1982. And since then, if they've had a church historian at all, it's been a lawyer. I think that speaks volumes. The only other thing I'll say is Mike and Nemo, without trying to kind of be too much of a boomer, both of you sort of have come on the scenes in kind of like the twilight of classic Mormon apologetics, because things were much more ugly, much more heated, and Mormon apologetics were much, much more relevant in the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s. But I'm just, I'm happy and proud to say for me, something that I'm most proud of is I believe that the work of Mormon stories, the work of Mormon expression, the work of the CES letter, the work of Mormon Think, the work of Bill Real and Radio Free Mormon, the work that we've done have exposed classic Mormon apologists and even Mormon neo apologists as the frauds that they are, such that they've become Decreasingly relevant. Again, one of my crowning moments in Mormon stories is contributing to the ouster of Daniel C. Peterson from the Maxwell Institute in 2012. And for me, that marked sort of the beginning of the end of Mormon apologists and Mormon apologetics. And I don't see them ever reclaiming that status again because just their arguments are bad. When it really comes down to it is Mormon apologetic arguments are bad and they accelerate people's faith crisis because they're so bad. And to me, that's. That's the most important thing to say about Mormon apologetics.

Nemo 2:32:57 Now, can I do a very rare thing and actually say something positive about myself and my contributions to the world?

John Dehlin 2:33:02 Sure.

Nemo 2:33:03 Which is, I feel like my contribution to the decline of Mormon apologetics, even though I am a young whippersnapper, as you pointed out, John, was that I managed to get Scott Gordon riled up into trying to get my videos taken down. SCOTT Gordon, HEAD OF FAIR when the thing my channel started on was pushing back against kwaku, and this is the show which was some terrible Mormon apologetics aimed at a younger crowd, which engaged in so much ad hominem and strawman argumentation. It was. It was unbelievable. So my channel starting was part of embarrassing them into removing those videos, which John correctly predicted would be removed. And they were so ashamed of them that Scott Gordon tried to have my videos analyzing them taken down so that there would be no memory of them left on the inset. And he didn't succeed. So I just want to add that in that is my. The small part I played in the decline of Mormon apologetics.

Nemo 2:33:59 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:34:00 Getting rid of those KWAKU Cardinalis. This is the show videos was. It was also a huge contribution that you and others helped help make. It's just been fun. They're not worthy adversaries. I wish the church could come up with better adversaries because the ones they've come up with have only supported the cause of truth in the end. Mike, we want to give you the last word.

Mike 2:34:25 No. I think apologetics do work for some people, and there are a lot of people that when they are motivated enough to make sure they stay in that bubble, they're going to stay in apologetics and they're going to find the value in being in that safe space. And there are a lot of people like that. And so I think there are going to be people that are saved in the church for a period of time or maybe forever by apologetics. But I want to end with a quote from Seinfeld, which I Don't know if everybody will get this, but there's an episode with Lloyd Braun, I believe the character's name is, and they're selling these computers, and Lloyd keeps selling them, and he's obviously kind of gone crazy, and he keeps saying, serenity now, serenity now. And they're trying to do that to keep calm. And at the very end, he goes, serenity now, insanity later. And I feel like with apologetics, it's like you get the apologetics now, but at some point, once you start to see what they're doing, then it backfires in the worst way. And so I do feel like apologetics have that same mindset of giving you that peace now, but later it's going to cause a faith crisis, because they are ultimately giving you information that is easily disputed and easily debunked. And I think that is going to lead to more people to stop leaving, which is why you do see more apologists who aren't even trying to defend some of this, but instead trying to find more meaning to stay, such as, you know, calling it a revelation, just get away entirely from all of that. But it just simply. It doesn't work. And if you've made it through this episode, I hope it's been helpful. I know this is kind of a tricky one to talk about, not because it's triggering to people, just because there are so many aspects of apologetics. But hopefully we gave you some overview here, and like I said, it's one that I encountered the CS letter. First. I was asked to read the Fair Mormon Reply, and I think I've told the story before, but I remember reading the Fair Mormon Reply for the first time, and I spent hours reading it, and I thought, I don't think this shows the church is true, but it does show there are answers. And then I read the CES letters reply to FairMormon, and I was like, oh, crap, they're just making stuff up. And then I read the Fair Mormon's reply to the CS letters reply to the Fair Mormon reply. And then all of a sudden you started seeing the games are being played. And it's not to say the CS letter is perfect. I think there are problems with the CS letter as well. But it does show that the CS letters, especially when you talk about the main issues, they have concrete information, and no amount of apologetic spin can stop that. And so apologetics just are not effective as long as someone's willing to go beyond the surface. And so I hope this series has taken people beyond the surface to know why this is such an important issue to talk about and why it just simply doesn't work.

John Dehlin 2:36:53 Yeah. For me, the only people for whom Mormon apologetics work are for those who are just looking to confirm their biases. But. But for those who are honest truth seekers, who are. Who care about evidence, who care about truth. I think in the short term, Mormon apologetics might temporarily pacify. But. But in my experience, for real truth seekers, for people who are courageous, who are willing to sincerely evaluate the truth claims of the church, and who aren't bound by their job or their marriage or their social influences unduly, I think in the end, Mormon apologetics accelerates people's loss of faith. Nemo, we'll give you the last word here, brother.

Nemo 2:37:43 Oh, give me the last word. Oh, okay. I think apologetics is. Is a. To use the phrase, game. I guess it's just a bad game, and people shouldn't be playing it. When it comes to Mormonism, if the church is. Truth claims could stand up. They would just take very simple defenses. It shouldn't take vast institutions of multiple employees having to nitpick and argue and fight over the tiniest little details, and they've convinced you somehow that that is what it would take to defend the true word of God. But an omnipotent being who's revealing plain and precious truths shouldn't need all that.

John Dehlin 2:38:22 Yeah, yeah, yeah. The God, the creator of the universe shouldn't need goofy apologetics to make his case, you know?

Nemo 2:38:30 No. And. And a church that claims. Sorry, a church that claims to have individuals who speak directly to and for God doesn't need apologists either.

Mike 2:38:39 No.

Nemo 2:38:40 Prophets and apostles should be able to come out and authoritatively state positions on an issue. And they don't. They hide behind. Like my own experience with Dallin H. Oaks. He hid behind Scott Gordon from Fair Mormon. He hid behind the studies that Fair Mormon did and the defenses they made of his statements at the University of Virginia. He could have just said. He could have just said, I wasn't lying or I misspoke or whatever, but he did not give an opinion of his own. And this is the problem with the LDS Church. We have a leadership structure who aren't accountable to anyone, but equally don't make any assertions of their own, even though they would be the ones you would expect to, because they claim to speak for and to a deity. So you shouldn't need apologists.

John Dehlin 2:39:24 No, I love it. All right, well, Mike, thank you so much for today's episode and for all your great work with LDS discussions.

Closing Remarks and Thank You

Mike 2:39:33 Thanks everybody. Hope it was good. Sorry for being a longer one, but I think it was an important one.

John Dehlin 2:39:38 And Nemo, it's great to have you. And again, please follow Nemo the Mormon channel on YouTube, subscribe and and donate to Nemo and subscribe to the Mormon Stories Podcast YouTube channel. Also subscribe to us on Facebook, on TikTok, on Instagram, and please donate to Mormon Stories@MormonStories.org Click on the Donate Become Donate button. Become a monthly donor and we'll continue offering content like this for as long as there's support. Thanks everybody. Appreciate your great work, everybody. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other, and we hope to see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast and on LDS discussions. Take care everybody.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.