The Transfiguration of Brigham Young

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon stories podcast LDS discussions Edition I am one of your hosts for today John delid it is April 26th 2023 and we are here today to discuss I think and I think Mike and maybe even Nemo eventually is are going to agree that this is actually one of the more if not one of the most important episodes in this entire LDS discussion Series today we're going to be talking about the Transfiguration of Brigham Young which is the story that I was told growing up that when there was a succession crisis Joseph Smith died that um Brigham Young's face transformed into Joseph's as a miracle to let the Saints know that they were to follow Brigham out to Salt Lake that's the quick preview um we're doing this as part of the LDS discussion series let me just remind you all who are joining us for the first time what that is my friend Mike which we're about to bring on um convert to the more adult convert to the Mormon church has put together an amazing website at ldsdiscussions.com where he's written uh 50 plus essays plus a bunch of other content where once he obtained let's just say a truth enlightening regarding the the origins of of accurate Mormon church history he decided to write a bunch of essays where he wanted to process that and share it so that other people would learn the things he was learning that he didn't get taught prior to joining the church or even immediately after joining the church and so that's what the LDS discussions website is about and then of course we're now this will be 42 episodes into the Mormon stories podcast series with LDS discussions you can obviously find this episode integrated into the Mormon stories podcast feed on all the different platforms but you can also find this LDS discussion series as its own podcast series on Spotify in both video and audio and on Apple podcasts and wherever you get your podcasts and of course we have a YouTube playlist on the Mormon stories podcast Channel dedicated to just these episodes but uh this is definitely this series is definitely one of the most important things Mormon stories has ever done in its 18-year history and without any further Ado we bring on uh Mike and Nemo to uh to join us hey Mike how's it going good how you guys all doing out there good it's good to have you yeah it's good to be back like I've been teasing this one for a few episodes this is one of my favorite ones uh just from the standpoint of kind of putting all of this back together I think this episode is one uh that to me is one of the most important so hopefully everybody you know especially if you've never heard about this stuff before hopefully this will be a good one for everybody watching yeah well we're excited to Jump Right In I'll also just add that this particular story was a major crack in my um Faith shelf uh when I learned about it and I learned about it kind of almost pre-internet from a dialogue article that we're going to be discussing in just a second but uh if if not if having Mike from LDS discussions weren't enough we also have the Nemo from the Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel joining us hey Nemo hey how you doing how are things in the UK I wish I could say good but you know how's the Nemo family oh my family's great uh we're all fine so yeah we're loving life that's almost all that matters if Nemo and his family are okay yeah yeah all right man thanks for joining us and and Nemo is it is it fair to say that you haven't really dug into this particular topic yet and so while you may know conceptually what it's about you'll be kind of offering a fresh reaction to kind of the details is that right yes so the overview you offered is essentially all I know about this story uh and when I knew we'd be doing an episode on it I thought oh wouldn't it be fun if I actually just don't look into it too much and kind of offer my life reaction to this uh on air yeah yeah and I'll just say not to build it up too much but like I had been a member for three decades a lifelong member for three decades before I heard this story and it was shocking the story was shocking to me and so hopefully we're not building it up too much but uh that's why that's why I agree with Mike it's super important all right Mike should we jump in or what no yeah I mean all I would point out is um we we've done would you say 42 episodes and I would say that you know when you look at all these topics a lot of them are topics that have been covered by other podcasts other books whatever and to me when I was doing these these overview topics on the website the two that really stick out my head today that are the two that are the most important uh topics because of the fact they're not covered that much is the 116 Pages as well as this one in the 116 Pages episode we did um I thought was important because it gave us a real good window into how Joseph Smith was able to create Revelation and create the text of the Book of Mormon when he got himself into a jam where he needed to basically find a way out and we covered all that in that episode if you have not watched that I highly recommend it um the Transfiguration of Brigham Young does a slightly different um approach but it kind of gives you that same window which is a window into how do these stories that we hear so much of um come together and and a lot of the stories and we'll go through this as we go but when you hear about Miracle stories in the church whether it's the priesthood restoration the first Vision or if you look into even earlier religious um Miracle stories we don't have contemporary accounts to base it against and that's why this one is so important because we have the beginning and we have the end and we can now evaluate all of that and then say what does this mean to all of these things we've been talking about in the previous 40 episodes I like I said I'm like totally like nerding out about this one because it was as John said this one was a massive aha moment for me and it's such a story that seems very inconsequential especially when we're so focused on Joseph Smith and the foundations of the church um this story though gives us just such a huge Spotlight onto a lot of the things we've been pointing out about earlier stories I feel like this one's going to be kind of like a little bit of a glue that kind of pulls everything back together so I'm excited so I'm good I have to go with that so that said so Nemo just to check in with your British sensibilities have we hyped this enough yet or do we need to Hype it a little bit more I think you need to lessen the hype please yeah we need to bring the levels down all right keep a nice monotony all right yeah yeah under promise under promise and over deliver okay absolutely so here's the slide deck and there's a preview of uh some art that that I pulled off of Google that basically shows Brigham Young at a Pulpit some saints in the audience and then kind of like light shining down and the image of Joseph Smith appearing and that's a bit of a preview so let's dig in Mike let's go to slide one yeah and so just to point out you know kind of saying is we you know we're kind of at that point now where we're wrapping up at least the main part of these episodes we might try to add some later um because I know there's been a lot of topics people in here about um but this is what I would consider one of the biggest uh miracles in the history of Mormonism that's not directly tied to Joseph Smith and it's known as the Transfiguration of Brigham Young and one of the most difficult issues for both critics and apologists is that no matter how much evidence we have we can never know exactly what happened because we were not actually there and in most cases we don't have first-hand witnesses that recorded it contemporaneously as well and so that's why you'll often hear the phrase we cannot know everything or we'll get the answers in the next life because ultimately when you talk about the early stories like the first vision and the priesthood restoration there was no one there filming them there were no reporters there were no uh articles in the local newspapers about these things um you know and as we talked about the first Vision it wasn't even mentioned by Joseph Smith for 12 years and even then it was just his own uh little Journal was not out to the main church and so because of that it gave Joseph Smith room to change those stories as he retold them but it also gives apologists and the church the ability to use that we cannot know everything line to deflect from the fact that with the first vision and the priesthood restoration we do have a lot of documents that point to the fact that they are clearly being changed ideas are being retrofitted some instances we can tell that the details are being made up out of out of nothing but because there was no contemporaneous writing from someone at the time apologists will continue to say well you weren't there so you don't know this story changes that kind of angle of apologetics and really cements this down into something we can evaluate yeah yeah and and another angle is is two things it's the importance of Miracle stories to a faith tradition if you're Catholic well if you're Christian if you just think about the well no let's go back in the Old Testament it's Moses parting the Red Sea it's God wiping out all the humans on the planet and animals you know with the flood it's David slang Goliath you have to have these Miracle stories uh to to kind of like bolster the faith of the membership and then if you switch to Jesus's time there's Jesus curing the lepers there's Jesus helping the blind see there's Jesus turning the Loaves and Fishes into you know multiplying the Loaves and the fishes to feed the multitudes or turning water into wine like you really don't have a faith tradition without these miraculous stories many many followers of a religious tradition base their faith on these miraculous stories so that's one and and this was this story was absolutely part of my faith which is why it was shocking to me when I learned something different but then secondly if you want to look you know the purpose of the LDS discussion series is to give people information to uh be able to look at Mormonism as a faith tradition objectively uh we're not trying to push anyone in any direction per se but we are trying to share evidence so that people can have informed consent and make informed decisions and what I think today would show is an alternative view if you're open to um maybe something not being miraculous but instead you're open to a secular explanation both for this story in particular but also you just want to learn how Miracles can develop over time if they're not rooted in reality today is like the perfect laboratory for that I think all right a Nemo anything you want to add or you just yeah you say well you say that we're we're not going to one side or another but let me quote Richard Dawkins for a moment uh um so he talks about Mormonism uh in a very interesting way and it's a thing that kind of comes up to me regularly is that what's interesting about Mormonism compared to sort of Catholicism or other Faith Traditions is that it's relatively new as a faith tradition and so we have documents from its founding from its beginning we have newspaper articles from the times when Joseph Smith was around you know so we we can undo the sort of apologetic arguments that are used in other Faith Traditions or the arguments that are used by the defendants of other Faith traditions where we say well we can't no we weren't there well we kind of can know because good records were kept from the time when these things happened that's the only point I'd like to to add yeah yeah I've heard it said and I'm gonna mask her the quote something like Whoa whoa be unto the person who starts a religion after the invention of the printing press because it's one thing to claim a miracle two thousand years ago when there's no self and you could even say worse with cell phones right and with cameras um and the internet but it's one thing to claim a miracle that happened two thousand years ago it's another to claim uh a set of Miracles when you've got documented evidence to back it up so anyway all right Mike uh should we go to the next slide uh yep sorry about the shakiness yeah I'm gonna go to the next slide all right so let's uh here we are yeah so this is basically getting into the story of it and so as John mentioned earlier after Joseph Smith was killed uh there was no there was no clear plan and who is going to be the next prophet and so that led to a lot of confusion and again that's one of those things where uh you know if you would think that there'd be some better um way to to have this happen uh you think it would have been thought of ahead or God would have given a revelation about this but but no And so there's all this confusion and both Sidney Rigdon and Brigham Young both felt that they should lead the church moving forward um Sydney Rigdon felt that he should be the prophet Brigham Young felt that he should lead the church as the leader of the twelve and so this is basically the Transfiguration of Brigham Young story this is from a website called LDS answers and this is how they describe it Brigham Young a man fiercely loyal to the Prophet Joseph Smith current president of the twelve and later to become known as The Lion of the Lord takes a stand suddenly the people arise in Mass to their feet astonished one eyewitness later remembered it appeared that Joseph had returned and was speaking to the people as Brigham Young commences speaking hundreds in the audience believe in every possible degree it is Joseph's voice and his person in luck attitude dress and appearance it is Joseph himself personified um there are even stories where people say that Joseph Smith apparently had like a chipped front tooth and people would say that they even heard Brigham Young started talking with that s sound like when you have a chipped tooth and the S kind of s so I mean like that this was basically the story that Brigham Young turned transfigured into Joseph Smith in front of hundreds of people and this is this is obviously a crucial moment in history of church um because following Joseph Smith's death the church had split off into many factions as we all know um with all the living Witnesses following Emma Smith to form the reorganized Church uh due to their belief that polygamy is not from God um this moment is used to explain why Brigham Young was the one that was chosen by God to lead this church and why the this branch of Mormonism is true and The Only Living Branch of God's church and that Brigham Young was truly a prophet of God like this is you know this sounds crazy to maybe to some people listening but this is not just the most one of the most important miracles in Mormonism this is one of the most important miracles in in religion like to have this happen in front of hundreds of people um that's a miracle that would live up to a lot of the stuff in the Bible this is no small thing and so we accept this now as being the truth um I remember um I asked somebody I said how do we know Brigham Young was the one that was supposed to leave the church because you know you have all these these break-offs you know and so I'm like why why did everyone follow Brigham and they they said they said because when Joseph Smith died um Brigham Young spoke and he was being challenged a lot of people wanted to take over and everybody saw Brigham Young turn into Joseph Smith in every possible way and that's how they knew so I mean like that is exactly why Brigham Young ended up being the prophet so this story is is a massively important one even though a lot of people might kind of uh gloss over it because we focus so much on on Joseph Smith in earlier early church history Nemo I'm I'm curious to know were you taught this story growing up as a Mormon and do you have do you have memories of it at all well so yeah like like I said I knew the rough overview from my time in seminary and I knew that there was a succession crisis and I knew that this was part of what kind of Lent legitimacy to bring him Young's claim um and it's why I refer to the mainstream LDS church or the church that we're talking about um as the brighamite sect of the audio Church the brighamite branch sometimes because it is important to remember that the only time this was ever just one church was before Joseph Smith died and after that it just went and went and went and it's become it's become uh very uh sprawling I suppose you could say the family tree of Mormonism has become very sprawling so um I was aware of those other sects but I always believed that the LDS the brigamite sect was the right one because of things like this story yeah so from a faith perspective from a testimony relief perspective for you yeah yeah yeah yeah because there is that question in everyone's mind when you when you learn that there was more than one option when it wasn't just set in stone that Brigham Young was just going to become the prophet of church which I wouldn't be surprised if some people just believed that that it was just always they're going to be that way and that's how it was and they don't know about the story to this day but I I did know that there was a succession crisis and so when you when you know that there were options where it could have been Joseph Smith's son where it could have been Sydney Rhythm where it could have been Brigham Young you need to have a reason to come down on one particular side there has to be a reason why it was right to follow Brigham over the other options right there has to be a reason for that and there has to be a reason why I'm not going to Community of Christ or the reorganized LDS church um instead I'm going to the brighamite sect because that one has to have more legitimacy otherwise why wouldn't I go to the other so it's very important it was very important to me that that succession crisis went down in a way that meant that God was behind it and so Miracles are a key part of that yeah and I was just gonna say uh it's almost weird that we don't have an LDS discussions episode on the succession crisis because what what I for those who are newer to learning about Mormon church truth claims it's just a fact that that Joseph Smith promised his son Joseph Smith III that he would be his successor and that's why Emma stayed behind and waited until Joseph Smith III was old enough and that's why the reorganized church was started because Joseph Smith Jr himself said at one point or another that his son would take over and then there's Brigham Young but then there's also Sydney Rigdon who I think Sydney Rigdon was given the impression by Joseph that he would be the successor as well I'm sure Brigham Young was as well and there's even other people like James Strang who who said that Joseph Smith told them they were going to be the successors and so there's at least four people that I know of who there's good evidence for Joseph Smith told them they would be the successors and that's that's in and of itself an issue why would this be left to chance why would Joseph Smith be promising it to multiple people who's right and I think that's some of the tension that led to the need for some sort of Faith promoting story to even come about anything you want to add to that Mike well I would just point out again uh we mentioned this in a few episodes but we are told in the Mormon church that God knew Joseph Smith was going to lose the 116 pages of the Book of Mormon so thousands of years earlier he had made a second set of plates just for that one little event that he could see that long ago in the future and then at the same time that same God had no idea that it was really important to set up a uh process for who was going to take over the church in case Joseph Smith died like there are all of these plot holes that you see where you go yeah that doesn't make sense because on one hand God could see these really specific details and then on the other hand God couldn't see anything and um to both of your points I think that this story is basically you have all of these people that are under pressure from other sects of Mormonism uh obviously in this case the mostly the ones that stay back with Emma and so they all go across the country Utah through horrible conditions and eventually Brigham Young is going to take over the church with a very um authoritative style right Brigham Young was a uh you know I'm not I'm not a Birmingham young fan um for a lot of reasons but you need to create these stories uh one to justify why you did what you did you got to justify going across the country of Utah you have to justify why you are now in what you consider to be the correct branch of the church and you need miracles to convince other people why they should join your branch over others so this serves a lot of different elements that are needed and and when we talk I don't want to skip to the end too much here but when you talk about miracles and other religions there's a reason why um when the Bible is put together you have these these different Miracle stories of the flood and of you know Adam and Eve and of the Tower of Babel and all that stuff because you need these origin stories to give justification that you are the chosen people that you are the people that are supposed to be uh God's God's people and so this is really to me a remnant of that and that's why this is such an important episode in my opinion because it gives us a new lens to view those other Miracles through yeah love it all right so I've already shown it but I'll show it again here is a enlarged photo of one artistic depiction of Brigham Young standing at a Outdoors at a Pulpit with the scriptures on the pulpit a bunch of members are listening and it's sort of this it's a really powerful and important moment in Mormon history I believe because it's really this kind of Showdown if there ever were a showdown in Mormon history it's Sydney Rigdon who is with Joseph almost from the beginning who was charismatic who was much loved but who also had fallen a little bit out of favor partly because of of a previous episode that we'd talked about which is his daughter well you know if you go to the happiness is it the happiness letter episode that we would want to reference letter yeah that's why we recommend that people kind of watch these episodes in sequence because if you watch the happiness episode happiness letter episode you'll remember that Joseph Smith proposition Sydney rigdon's daughter and she becomes one of the heroes of Mormon history because she declines Joseph Smith's super manipulative and uh I would say predatory um advances Nancy uh Nancy Rigdon and I don't think Joseph loved the fact that Nancy declined his advances and I don't think Sydney loved that Joseph was propositioning his daughter and so I'm sure that led to some strain between uh Joseph Smith and Sydney Rigdon towards the end and if I understand it didn't Sydney Rigdon like move to Ohio or something for a while in those final years of the church and almost become a little bit estranged from the central leadership of the church do either of you remember that I think that's a yes and no because I think he was he was told I believe the Revelation to move um but I think the reason was because um he was helping Joseph Smith run for president um and I think they also were trying to make sure they had places I don't know if it's because Nauvoo was kind of under stress and they were thinking they needed to have like a secondary location but I know Sydney rignton and Joseph Smith do make amends after the happiness letter incident um and Sydney Rigdon is there through the end helping him run for president um the downside though is that Sydney Rigdon was strongly opposed to polygamy and that's a huge problem um especially when you have someone like Brigham Young who was gung-ho on polygamy um because that was that was one way as Lindsey Hansen Park has so eloquently said Brigham had no game and so Brigham Young uh was rejected by uh some of the women early on and I think um that's probably not entirely relevant but Brigham Young was a huge proponent of polygamy as we know um and so I think really at the end of the day that's a huge reason why Sydney Rigdon um was so despised by a lot of people in Joseph's Inner Circle because he was against polygamy and they were for it and and ultimately um that that certainly played a role and then um Brigham Young also uh during this speech at this convention really focused on the power being with the 12 and so it's not until after I think three years after maybe that Brigham Young consolidates the power to himself at first it's about the 12 leading the church and then Brigham really takes over later so there's a lot of moving Parts in here but I don't think that Sydney Rigdon and Joseph were on bad terms at the end I think it's just that Sydney Rigdon basically got beat up by Brigham yeah if you look at the the most recent episode I've done you'll see that we talk about the uh but it's 1880 General Conference where John Taylor has made the third President of the church and he references the fact that for three years the Quorum of The Twelve were basically in charge of the church while they awaited Brigham Young to become the president and the other thing that came to mind was that um between Joseph Smith and uh Sydney Rigdon was the issue where if I remember Jonathan Street's presentation at Sunstone about the happiness letter was that essentially Joseph lied to Sydney and then Sydney went well hang on I've still got the letter and then Joseph had to make something up about you know trying to prove his daughter's worthiness and tempt her and that she rejected his advances he can prove that she's not the the sort of Harlot that everyone's saying she is um so they're like my point in that is that there's a lot of bad blood around polygamy for Sydney Rhythm so it's understandable that even if you made amends with Joseph he would still have been opposed to polygamy as a practice because it came very close to him and his family yeah and now and I'd point out to that point Nemo that in the happiness other episode and again I don't know the exact words because we did it a while ago but um Sydney Rigdon releases a statement after him and Joseph Smith make amends and in my opinion the statement throws Nancy under the bus a bit it tries to be very carefully worded to basically say Joseph never admitted to writing it which of course he didn't because he had scribes um in all of that so there is this weird kind of thing where I think they get past it Sydney Rigdon still hates polygamy but again Sydney Rigdon is Joseph Smith vice presidential candidate so in all reality um Sydney Rigdon is like the number two guy and probably should have been the person to take over the church it really just became a battle of of winning the the hearts of the church and I think that um if I recall correctly Sydney Rigdon was really sick before going to this convention so he kind of came off as weak and sick and Brigham Young had like this fiery speech where he wanted to be with the twelfths I mean there is this um this element of I don't know if Brigham Young had Charisma it sounds to me like he was more of a Charisma by power kind of guy but the point is at this event bullish yeah yeah so uh so Sydney Rigdon was still very um he had a claim probably to be number a legitimate claim to be the number two in the church but you know at the end of the day sometimes when when the leader you know the leader dies or is ousted uh you know it things take turns that you don't expect can I just point out real quick that if you've been watching this you would have seen we talked we talk a lot about the Nauvoo house and how God got very very specific about the size and amounts of shares that could be bought in the Nauvoo house very very specific minute details you would have thought he would have put an equal amount of effort into revealing to Joseph Smith the mechanisms by which power should be transferred in the event of Joseph Smith's death particularly if he's an omnipotent God he would have known the fact that Joseph Smith was going to be martyred and you would have thought he would put something in place it's just my thoughts only yeah that's my that's just it it like one of the one of the themes and I'll kind of skip off of this but one of the things we've talked about in these episodes is that Joseph Smith was able to do things when he was in full control and and that's the same for the church as a whole if you look at the church over the last even 30 years when they're not in control of situations things don't go well such as the November 15 policy which they claim was from God as Nemo said Joseph Smith was in control of how people were going to give them their money to build the navu house which was basically Joseph's mansion and yet God doesn't feel the need to to give directions about how his church would be succeeded by him and I think that's a big thing that people once you get to a point where you start doing the Deep dive you're like that is kind of interesting that God had no plan laid out when we have all of these other things that Joseph Smith was able to give Revelation on yeah absolutely one other one other tiny thing I'll just mention is one of the reasons why Brigham Young wasn't the obvious successor was because he was gone all the time like he didn't he spend a lot of those Nauvoo years as a missionary because at the time the 12 the Quorum of the 12 and I think we should have John Hamer on to talk about this my understanding is one of the main roles of the Quorum of The Twelve in the early church was to go out and be missionaries to go out and preach the gospel yeah and so Brigham Young had spent as I understand it way more time away then he had um in Kirtland or Nauvoo and so he wasn't as Familiar of a face or as a as a living breathing familiar presence to the people of Nauvoo and that's part of the reason why in addition to there not being an actual succession plan where he had to fight and struggle for his power is that is that your guy's understanding as well yeah well he honed his public speaking skills on his mission in the UK like that's where he would have learned all this and that's what would have come into effect here but it's interesting if you go to the scriptures you go to uh Doctrine and Covenants 107. um it talks about how the the um traveling Elders of the church are the Quorum of The Twelve so they're listed in scripture as a traveling band of high Priests of you know a traveling Quorum as it were so yeah they're very much according to scripture they're designed to be moving around and preaching yeah okay well let's jump to the next slide yeah so this is where the story gets interesting because again we have this miraculous story of the Transfiguration of Brigham Young but it's going to suffer from the same problems that we talked about with Joseph Smith's first Vision the priesthood restoration the 1831 polygamy Revelation and what so many of the other of these other stories do which is nothing was written down about it happening um this way at the time and so with with Brigham Young this is extremely more problematic because we do have many letters and journals from the day the meaning took place along with newspapers and church records from leaders not a single mention of this miraculous event is going to surface until at least seven years later when the allusions to this event begins to spring up in journals such as Emily hoyt's diary and so you know the most consequential event potentially I would say modern religious history happened and not a single person or publication mentioned it until seven years later and that is a massive red flag not just because it wasn't mentioned but because we have a lot of accounts of the event not mentioning it so like with the first Vision you could go well Joe Smith didn't have a journal in 1820 or in my opinion 1824 that said I saw God in Jesus he just he didn't do any of that in this case we have a lot of writings that talk about the event and we'll get into it a little bit in some cases you know there's pages of details about what happened not a single mention of them seeing it or anyone else reporting it and that is a really clear indication that this did not happen and I'm just going to repeat this so let's just say thousands of people were at this meeting if it might have been hundreds but I'm guessing it was thousands of people were at this meeting supposedly like you said Mike one of the biggest Miracles a literal Miracle where allegedly the entire crowd sees Brigham Young's face transfigure into Joseph Smith's face and his voice right and not a single person wrote about it in their Journal for at least seven years not a single person and I would add that the church was still printing you know newspapers or periodicals or whatever and there's no mention of it there either right right a question then or a thought possibly from the believing perspective would be we know in the Book of Mormon there were things that were talked about as being too holy to record you know the prayer that Jesus offers amongst the Nephites they say we can't write the things that he said for their too holy so the question becomes then was this a too holy an event to write about when we thought we should keep it to those that are present but then why do they start writing about it later because that's the question that's just it and we'll get into it it's it's and the thing is to John's point no one mentions it but I I even let's just say there were let's say the the place they had it had hundreds of people and enough there's thousands of members if this happened you would have people go leaving and going to the people who could not be at that event and be like Brigham Young's the guy to leave the church dude literally literally transformed transfigured into Joseph Smith we saw Joseph Smith that's the dude City Rigdon is a complete poser whatever whatever they whatever they said in our view times the point is you would have the word of the spreading because people would be telling those who couldn't be at the event you would not believe what I saw this is the dude to lead the church this is God's Church nothing nothing at all yeah yeah you think that's a really good point you think it would be spread uh far and wide it would be I mean it's a missionary uh I mean I I realize you're within the church but it's basically a missionary tool where for the people at the event to tell all the people not at the event yeah burgundy answer dude we're gonna follow because he literally turned into Joseph Smith so you would have other journals who might say uh I wasn't here but sister so and so told me she was there and she saw Joe's nothing there's not a single Journal anywhere there's not we have new John said there's newspapers there's magazines there's periodicals nothing there's not a single mention this just did not happen yeah all right well if it if there's no record of this happening for seven years I guess that then begs the question uh how did this myth evolve if it wasn't based on reality so should we jump to the next slide yeah and so this is uh the dialogue article that John I think referenced earlier I'm sure there's more than one dialogue article on it um but Richard van Wagoner um kind of discusses the evolution of the story in a dialogue for an article for dialogue and he documents that journals from the day surrounding the meeting discuss the event yet failed to mention the Transfiguration on every instance and so he says the following the legend is now unsurpassed in Mormon lore second only the Joseph Smith's own account of angelic Minister uh administrations and his first vision and that when uh the 8th of August 1844 is stripped of emotional overlay there is not a shred of irrefutable contemporary evidence to suggest or to support the occurrence of a mythical mystical event either in the morning or afternoon Gatherings of that day and so van Wagner in this article goes through all these journals and he continues by saying the Paramount dilemma with retrospective Transfiguration recountings is why so many otherwise honorable Pious people recalled experiencing something they probably did not a rational and likely explanation for this faulty group memory is that a contagious thought can spread through the populace to create a collective mind and that's a really important point to remember when you read about Joseph Smith and the witnesses of the Book of Mormon who give details that evolve over time and tend to fall in line with the collective mind in the collective account as they got older and so in other words people tend to believe a story the more they tell it regardless of the accuracy of the story and you can see that here and we'll get into the details but a lot of people are talking about being at this event that that some of them weren't even there and some of them obviously were there but never talked about it until much later well contemporaneously on their examples of people remembering things about 9 11 for example that just didn't happen yeah there is that too for sure so this this happens yeah oh yeah for sure yeah yeah so yeah exactly Nemo like is I as I understand it and and maybe you know you can Google this but there's a lot of people who claim that they remember watching uh the first I is it the first plane hit the Twin Towers or the second plane yeah second one the second plane hit the Twin Towers live as it was happening and it turns out it was never aired live that the only recordings I think the second one was was live but yeah I know what you mean I think it's the first one yeah yeah you guys I I wasn't prepared for this but I I definitely remember fact checking it once there's this whole Collective memory of people saying that they watched live one of the planes go into the towers when they've been able to show that there was no live coverage of that particular instance yeah I think that's just one of one of many examples I was going to also say that uh something really worth looking into is kind of social psychology and memory um because memory is just a really a really really tricky thing and um whether it's uh so there's a series I did on Mormon stories uh called the psychology of religion with Dr James Nagel and this is a classic Mormon stories episode I'm gonna include it in the show notes um from from a long long time ago but what what you learn about memory is that it's completely and this is kind of a disturbing thought but you learn that memory is completely malleable that people can uh and and will show this I think hopefully you're gonna you're gonna mention this in one of the later slides but if you tell a story enough that people hear and then you add enough time to it people can remember being at an event that they actually weren't at but because they they hear that story enough they have emotional attachment to the story and then they remember it they retrieve it remember it restore it and they do that enough times you give 5 10 or 15 years and it's been proven that people can remember being at events that they actually weren't at that's how powerful and how disturbingly unreliable um memory memory can be at times and I'm gonna just ask you all to watch the episode with Dr James Nagel on Mormon stories about the psychology of religion to kind of learn more about what I'm talking about there's a couple of cool articles we can look at um we won't go into them now but we can put them in the show notes about how people misremember 911 and how human memory tends to put together after the fact a cohesive series of events for example one man remembers hearing the news of 9 11 while he was on the street but it turns out in actual fact at the time that it happened and he heard the news from actual written solid records we know he was in his office and the theory goes that he was spending time on the street and in the office that day and as his brain put together a narrative he settled on one which wasn't necessarily true so things like that happen I love it and I'll I'll paste those into the show notes perfect okay Mike back to you yeah a week ago the next slide I mean I think we've covered the okay next slide so this one's really interesting because this is we thought we had an episode on back dating Revelation and in a lot of ways this is a backdated miracle and so I mentioned earlier the website LDS answers who had the article on the Transfiguration and they say within a year of the Transfiguration the miracle had been referred to several times although they uh surprisingly provide no sources um again this was covered in both Nauvoo newspapers along with notes from many leaders of the church the idea that they missed such a miraculous event is requiring you to literally suspend all common sense and if they had proof that it was recorded they would have presented it so I just want to be upfront that while they say that it happened within it within a year they have no sources and I've never come across one um and it would be front and center in every lesson that explained my Brigham Young was the chosen successor to Joseph Smith um Wilford Woodruff would be a later Prophet wrote something wait I have to ask Mike I'm I'm glad not understanding something are you saying that the church has claimed that there were newspaper articles about this within a year of it happening so this website is LDS answers is not I don't think it's an official Church site it's like a kind of like a fair Mormon kind of site I'm just saying that their article about it makes the makes the very clear as they're saying within a year that there began to be for what's the word uh whatever that whatever it says refer to it says it was referred to several times and it's just not they give no sources and I've never found one that refers to this event so I just don't want to confuse our listeners so yeah we don't know of any evidence that this was referred to before those set that seven year window but there are LDS apologetic LDS websites that appear to be falsely claiming that yeah LDS answers is a project of the Joseph Smith Foundation I've just had a quick look so in the Joseph Smith foundations connected to the church so it's the Hannah Hannah Stoddard group is that right yeah okay so there you go there's the connection for you okay yeah go ahead go ahead Mike keep going yeah so I just you know just want to point out that you'll you'll hear some apologetic sources say that but you won't you're not going to find the sources and so Wilford Woodruff who's going to be obviously a prophet of the church wrote seven pages in his journal on this day not a single mention of any Transfiguration change in Voice or any other miraculous event uh parley P Pratt wrote about the day in his autobiography which was finished in 1856 not a single mention of anything miraculous happening um there are writings from Brigham Young Heber C Kimball Willard Richards not a single mention of any miraculous event um and then there's this diary that's been used by Church Scholars wait wait I just have to note you would think that if Brigham Young experienced the transfer Transfiguration himself that he would have both noticed it and written about it right maybe not though maybe I mean if you're going to take it from a faithful perspective he might be like well he's just talking he doesn't even realize what everyone else is seeing so I suppose I mean I don't think he'd write uh I turned into Joseph Smith today boom you know I I don't I don't think he'd have that so that one isn't that's it but you might have some you might have a writing that says you know I spoke against Sydney Rigdon um the crowd said they saw me turn into Joseph Smith I don't know via diary today the strangest thing happened yeah no but you would think that if he was transforming into Joseph Smith he would get the memo too it wouldn't the memo wouldn't be for everyone around him oh yeah but but but also you would think that people would immediately come up to him and tell him and if he's gonna take the time to write a journal entry that night he would mention it right you would think yeah I mean you would think and that's just it all of the everything everything is pointing to this didn't happen I mean it's just I don't know how more to say it but this one is really funny because um there's one diary that's been used by some church scholars in the past to prove it was mentioned at the time it's a diary written by George lobb but as van Wagoner discovers the small tan colored leather diary which has misled many scholars has now been determined to be a copy of the original by lob himself with additions in addition they have since found the original diary and it contains no references whatsoever to the Transfiguration of Brigham Young so much like with the retrofitting of the priesthood restoration or the Charles anthon line if I cannot read a sealed book to Martin Harris this story was literally Rewritten into a second version of this journal in an attempt to give the story more credibility do we know what year he rewrote his own because that's pretty condemning I think it was 10 years later if I'm not positive I think it was 10. so 10 years later which fits after the seven year window he rewrites his own diary and inserts the story after that seven year window yeah yeah that's that's pretty condemnatory I think wow yeah so Nemo I heard a while from you that's just yeah I have nothing else to say okay wow we got a Nemo wow that's for a Brit a wow is a significant event so and Dave's gonna note it yeah all right should we go to the next slide yeah we can go to the next one okay so this one this is one of those this is one of those ones where you hear this now and I'm just like holy crap like so this is Apostle Orson Hyde um speaking at General Conference in 1869 and this is what Orson Hyde says to the church we went among the congregation and president young went on the stand well he spoke and his words went through me like electricity am I mistaken said I or is it really the voice of Joseph Smith this is my testimony it was not only the voice of Joseph but there were the features the gestures and even the stature of Joseph before us and the person of Brigham and the problem is that Orson Hyde wasn't actually a Nauvoo that day um he arrived five days he arrived five days later as confirmed by the Journal of Wilford Woodruff so he wasn't even there and this account has been used in church lessons before uh even though the history has been available for decades that it could not possibly have happened and so to John's point maybe he believed he was there but he was not there I mean yeah my understanding was he was traveling back from like England or the UK yeah he was traveling so he was like like even passport or you know the equivalent of Diaries He was literally like on a boat coming back because he had heard that Joseph had died but he wasn't able to make it yep to Nauvoo in time yeah he was a missionary yeah he was a missionary I think the diary says he arrived back from wherever he came from so I mean like it the the the the journal entry that talks about him getting there five days later I think says he arrived back from wherever he was so I mean it's pretty clear that he was not there was no way he could have been there and Nemo what what are you thinking about that I just had a bit of snack to add to be honest this is the second time in his life that Orson hides not been in the states when he ought to have been the first times when Joseph married his wife and then the second time is when he should have been there to witness this miracle you know yeah he's he's he's not great at being where he ought to be really um that's dark humor Nemo sorry very dark no no this this story that we just told about Orson Hyde was the lightning bolt for me yeah absolutely that's not skirt over that right I said let's not skirt over that carry on yeah yeah like he's an apostle decades later he's standing up in general conference to tell this powerful Faith promoting miraculous story with his Apostolic or whatever Authority um and and we now know that he wasn't even there but we don't even need to believe that he was lying or fooling people we know enough now about social psychology to be able to say it would actually be weird if stuff like this didn't happen because this is how the human brain works but it's so condemnatory that we have Apostle over the pulpit completely misleading everybody saying that he was there when we have hard evidence that he wasn't even there yeah and I like you know it's one of those things we talk about the gift of discernment our next episode is going to be on spiritual Witnesses but imagine all the people watching this General Conference and getting that feeling like that that spiritual feeling when they hear the story about yeah Brigham Young is the dude and it's not true and so all of those feelings that the people in the in the congregation the audience all these spiritual feelings they have again are based on a false story and so it again calls in all like like I said all these episodes we've done are building to try to make sense of all these things and put this puzzle back together and this is another area we could talk about in our next episode spiritual Witnesses where you can be fooled you can be manipulated by other people's stories um of things that didn't happen we obviously have the with Paul Dunn uh the Paul Dunn stories and more modern uh church history where he was telling fake stories at General Conference and you get that emotional feeling that's obviously based on a lie but this is um whether or not he was lying intentionally or he really believed it it's it's a story that is backed getting a miracle that never happened and you can now see how the church is just going from something mundane to one of the most important miracles of all time and just they're just rolling with it as if there's no question about it and I think that's a really important thing when we look back at these other Miracle stories in the church I think it's just like like Nemo said you can't skirt past this this is a very crucial window that we have to look at how Miracles can be kind of created and then cemented and to be kind to Olson Hyde after I just made quite a mean joke his expense um it would be fair to say that if he's hitched his wagon to Brigham Young he's which he's hitched his wagon to the Brigham Young presidency bring a mistake out of the church his legitimacy is as an apostle is tied up in Brigham Young's legitimacy as the rightful successor of Joseph Smith so he's kind of got to get on the bandwagon of the yes Brigham Young is the right man to have success to to be the success of Joseph Smith this story proves it's I'm going to reaffirm this story I I can tell it in the first person because you know it'll be Faith promoting and I've got a spiritual witness that it happened so it's like I saw it because we know with the Book of Mormon Witnesses they saw things with their spiritual eyes so it's it's not out of the Realms it's a possibility um that he said well you know I've had God's revealed it to me I've had this spiritual witness that it was so so I'm going to say it as though it happened myself and I'm gonna put that story out there because my position here is tied to the legitimacy of this story in part yeah you know it's funny yeah well what's funny about Orson Hyde and obviously I don't really have all of it ready off top of my head but Orson Hyde hits you like you said he hitches his wagon to Brigham Young this is in 1869. um six years later Brigham Young is going to reorder the seniority of the the 12 which effectively screws Orson hide over of any chance of being profit so Orson Hyde repays uh Brigham Young repays Orson hides uh whatever you want to call lies or a loyalty by basically cutting them with cutting him off at the knee so he can't be profit so you know Orson Heiden Brigham Young uh did not see eye to eye and obviously Brigham Young is going to have the last laugh because he's going to completely screw him over six years later and I'm just going to Echo a point you just made Mike which is the epistemological point because it we can all safely assume that when Orson Hyde is telling this story someday in general conference you know powerfully in 1869 that all the people in the audience are feeling what they think is the Holy Ghost they're going to be feeling how could it not be that they're all you know not feeling that's a double negative they must have all been feeling completely moved and inspired by Orson Hyde telling the story about the miracle of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young in the Transfiguration and yet now we know he wasn't there and and and it can't be that the Holy Ghost would Inspire everyone um in a story that was built on a lie and so that is the epistemological question if everybody was feeling what they knew was the Holy Ghost when we know that the Holy Ghost wouldn't testify about a lie then it begs the question then what were they feeling it is when when somebody's listening in general conference or in seminary or in the temple or wherever they are they're reading the scriptures and they feel these overwhelming emotions if it's not the Holy Ghost necessarily then what is it that that's the big epistemological question is how do we know things and our feelings a reliable way to to end up knowing something so I just I just gotta gotta repeat that okay um should we go to the next slide Mike yeah we go the next one all right let's do it yeah and so uh you know as we talk about the Transfiguration of Brigham Young is the central story um as to why Brigham Young was chosen to lead after Joseph Smith's death and I'm referencing this article from LDS answers just because it's a one of the more thorough articles about kind of the apologetic response but um they say if the Lord miraculously transfigured Brigham Young's appearance Brigham Young was divinely sanctioned as Joseph Smith's successor if the Transfiguration never took place the very foundations of our LDS faith in history are weakened and this is very similar to the um Gordon B Hinckley quote on the first Vision where they say either it's the most miraculous event that ever took place for this whole thing's a fraud and and I agree it's true and um this you know this is why I believe that this is one of the most important events to understanding church history because it gives us an evidence-based path to see how myths can grow from the most ordinary events into something just absolutely miraculous and so in this case we can look at the tangible contemporary evidence to see that this event never happened and yet years later it's going to be spoken of as an undeniable fact that gave members that were not even present at the event a spiritual witness that had happened and I think all of like there's so many elements to the story and that's why at the start of the episode I was saying this to me this is one of the most important episodes because it gives you an insight into how miracles happen into spiritual Witnesses into how church history can be kind of you know retrofitted all of this stuff is coming together in a way that really does show LDS answers is right if this didn't happen it weakens the idea that the break of my branches is the true branch of God it doesn't necessarily mean the Book of Mormon is false because this is after but it does tell us uh that church history has a lot of issues and in this case we can show exactly what happened at the day that the speech took place and seven years later how how this miracle is going to start to grow love it um and I'll just say another example of of this sort of apologetic argument in addition to the Gordon B Hinckley quote you mentioned was in the 1960s I believe when the information about the stone and the hat and the translation of the Book of Mormon and and Joseph Smith's folk magic and treasure digging in the 1826 Bainbridge trial when all that evidence starts to emerge Hugh nibbly doubles down and says man if all this folk magic peepstone in the Hat stuff is true it would be the most damning evidence to the church that the church could ever experience and then it all turned out to be true and then of course apologies just changed the narrative and say man it doesn't really matter but there are lots of instances of that uh that sort of stuff happening where the gauntlet gets thrown down and then the apologists are disproven and then they just they move the goal posts back right well yeah it's like uh Joseph Fielding Smith said If evolution is truth on the church is false and obviously I think at this point you know that's a statement that the church would love to not have in the records but you know there is you know that's why I always laugh because we've talked about this through the episodes but the church has gone from very specific Revelations very black and white crystal clear we know and now today they know less and less every day and it just shows us because every time they stick their neck out and say we know this is going to happen or we know what this means and then they're proven wrong which has happened over and over they look like they look like fools and so now they basically say we don't know who heavenly mother is please don't ask because we don't know um and it just shows that this is what happens when you make these these statements um when history is not on your side yeah Nemo anything you want to just reading up about the two uh professors at BYU that are mentioned in the CES that's one of them's the certain of Bruce omakonke who declare the idea of the Broken Hat being fictitious and they're like why else would it be for and they lay out all these things that just wouldn't make any sense and would make the church untrue if that were true so you need to be really careful about those kind of binaries because they don't always work in your favor yeah yeah absolutely I think that's Joseph Fielding McConkey yeah okay well let's go to the next slide Mike yeah this one's interesting because you know as I'm doing this the I did the Saints chapter by chapter thing it was one of the first things I did on the website it was a very quick every day for those who don't know tell our viewers and listeners what Saints is especially for a non-member not never Mormon listeners so Saints is a a set of books that the church put out I believe in 2018 they started releasing them I think there's four volumes and effectively it is what they call the most comprehensive honest open history of Mormonism and it's written in like a narrative Pro it's almost like it's written for like a young adult audience so it's written in a kind of a fluffy kind of there's like um they have like dialogue between people and they try to weave history through it um and so uh when the first one came out I just launched the website and I was doing every day I would do one well not every day but I would do a chapter in like 15 minutes so just do a real quick recap of what I what I read what I thought was was inaccurate and I would put links to where I thought people could learn more um it's certainly not um it was never meant to be like a super um scholarly Adventure it's more just my my kind of stream of stream of Consciousness thoughts but um the first book basically leads up to Joseph Smith's death and I think the second one is uh kind of forming Utah I'm not sure what the I haven't really read them after the first one um so it basically is supposed to be a history of the church that is accessible to any member or basically from I would say like Middle School on as far as the complexity of language and all that right and um oh yeah and so within yeah within the first book they do talk about the Transfiguration of Brigham Young and it's interesting because this book the Saints book is done by uh Scholars within the church and you can kind of see in this in this excerpt how you could tell the scholars kind of know that the story is actually weak historically so I want to read um how Saints uh treats the Transfiguration of Brigham Young um and so it goes seven years later Emily Hoyt recorded her experience of watching Brigham speak to the Saints testifying how much he looked and sounded like Joseph on the stand in the years to come dozens of saints would add their witness to hers describing how they saw Joseph's prophetic mantle fall on Brigham that day and so if you read that paragraph knowing the history you could see exactly what the writers of saints is trying to accomplish here which is they're presenting the account as proof to members that it happened but they're they're putting in that it wasn't written down until years later so when someone like me points out the absence of any contemporary evidence they can claim they were being honest in how they framed it but but I would just point out that this this you know if you read it not knowing the history you'd be like oh my goodness they all saw it at the time and just didn't write it down I think it's a really carefully worded paragraph to make it sound like it's a factual event while also trying to be accurate so you know they can fall back and say we weren't holding anything back from people it's like everything they said that was true but the the key is in what they didn't say yeah and if you look at the church's own standard of honesty you go to chapter 13 of gospel principles and it says um you know to lead someone to believe something that isn't true or to only present them with half of the truth is to be dishonest so it's you know they can't they can't really get away with with that yep 100 that's the thing it's like it they're they're wording it in a way that they're trying to say we're being honest but they're leaving out all of the context you know and honestly I'd be like seven years yeah seven years later Emily Hoyt wrote in a drill blah blah uh through for the first seven years no one ever mentioned it happened but then dozens of people miraculously came out and said it happened so I just I think it's a really dishonest framing that's almost lawyerly in the way that they're doing it because they're trying to be very careful to not outright lie but they're leaving out all the important information for members and is as Nemo said that that doesn't pass their own definition of honesty in any way yeah yeah it's almost like cigarettes have that warning label you know that this stuff could be hazardous to your health a really truly ethical organization would say hey this is a story that did developed later but seven years is a long time it's problematic that there was no journal entries or newspaper articles uh so you know take with a grain of salt but this is this is part of our folklore and if you want to believe it fine but just know there's some problems with it that's a that's probably a standard for a religious organization that's that's that that's uh ironically the level of honesty the honesty that they expect from their members while being an excessive uh expectation for a religious organization it's even well it's even in contradiction to the Fireside that they did they did the face-to-face event with the youth outside the navu temple and they had a couple of church historians with them and they said you know this book was written by historians it's it's narrative uh in its approach it reads like a storybook but it is historically accurate and they kept just pushing the fact that historians have worked on it historians have worked on it and they've got the two stories with them but any historian worth their soul would look at the fact there was a seven year gap between when the event supposedly happened and there being no accounts and they would start to question then the veracity of the event Why did no one write about it until seven years later that's like almost historian 101 to my mind yeah but but and if we want to be kind we can flip it and actually acknowledge that many many many many people have left the Mormon Church lost their faith in the Mormon church as a result of the church publishing the gospel topics essays uh beginning in 2014 I believe and many people have left the church after reading the book Saints so while we're disappointed at the lack of complete honesty and transparency um to the church's credit we have to acknowledge this is an improvement over the past and it's an improvement that has come at some cost to the church because the Saints book has surely LED people out of Mormonism which means they're they're doing better right yeah I mean the Saints is a step forward it is and it's really one of those things though where you kind of look into like it's a low bar to to jump over to to do better than what they had done um but like I said I just I feel like when I did the chapter by chapter review and it helps when I first started doing my deep dive and I really was still pretty new at it and I was still able to see all these things like why are you not mentioning that or why are you changing your tone towards these these people who you recently said were awesome but because he left the church now all of a sudden they're unreliable it's just all of those those um kind of like weird uh the way they it's almost sometimes in in the Saints book because it is the narrative prose it almost feels like a cartoonish villain thing like you got like um people leave the church of early Witnesses William McClellan all these people and and they go from being like this righteous amazing person who joins a church like this evil Disney villain um but but the point is um it is a step in the right direction I just I feel like in the age of the internet they're only going in the right direction because they're being dragged there because of people like even like idiots like me who can put the stuff together um in a way that I think is is sourced well enough to where people can go oh he's not making it up because it's coming from the church's own history or the church's own Publications um so yeah I mean it's a step in the right direction but when you when you read that and you kind of know the history it just feels like they know what they're doing in the way they're framing it in the way they're wording it and I feel like that is where I have a hard time giving them too much credit because it's one thing um to say Well they're moving in the right direction you can look at you're like well I could see why they're taking that in this case you can really see the way they're constructing these sentences to dance around the really obvious problem that this was never mentioned contemporaneously all right let's go to the next slide yep and so this is uh something I say a lot and um you know uh follow the footnotes it's kind of like the follow the prophet song but just replace footnotes and um every time you read a church publication you should kind of follow the footnotes to see what they actually say and so um you know this account we just read what what Emily Hoyt uh was attributed to in Saints um but it's a little bit different than how it's actually just how she actually described it and so she said um but the god of Heaven who had said it was his business to provide for the Saints sent president Brigham Young home just in time include him not with the mantle of Elijah but the spirit and power which had rested on Joseph I was an eye an ear witness the manner of reasoning the expression of the countenance the sound of the voice thrilled my whole soul I knew that Joseph was dead and yet I often startled an involuntary looked at the stand to see if it was not Joseph it was not it was Brigham Young And it anyone and if anyone doubts the right of Brigham to manage Affairs for all the saints all I have to say to them is this get the spirit of God and know for yourselves and the point I'm making here is this account does not say that Brigham Young looked and sounded like Joseph unless you want to make those assumptions and impose that on her account what she's saying is that her his speech compared to Sydney Rigdon gave her a spiritual confirmation that Brigham Young should lead the church because it felt like he was ready to lead it as Joseph Smith did it was not until after this account that the story grew to Brigham actually becoming transfigured to look and sound like Joseph Smith because if you read Emily's account here she literally says I have to look up to see if it's Joseph which means that it didn't look like him because she would say I looked up and it looked like Joseph Smith and so there's a lot of details here that I think the church is kind of imposing on it to try to make it fit what's going to be the later accounts of the dozens of people who Grow the story from a mundane event to one of the biggest miracles of modern history because what she's saying is like his speech and manage of delivery and everything reminded me of Joseph Smith so much that I had to keep looking up to remind myself and check that it wasn't actually him returned and it wasn't it was bringing him she says it was not it was Brigham Young but because he's spoke in a way that reminded me so much of Joseph Smith that reaffirmed to me that he had received that prophetic mantle it's the same as like my brother sounds a lot like my dad and if he was speaking about something the way my dad would speak about it I'd have to keep looking up to check that isn't my dad talking and it's not it's my brother it's a similar sort of thing yeah and it would be one thing if her account said I was looking down at the ground and it sounded so much like like Joseph Smith I had to look up and when I looked up I saw Joseph Smith's image come over Brigham that would make more sense even though it's still seven years later but this is a really this is what we talked about the first Vision you know the details get larger and larger when they get retold and this is kind of the first working of a miracle that's going to continue to grow but what the Saints book wants to do is kind of use this to springboard to what we now are taught today but it's not in this text and so again if you're watching this as a faithful member you might say I'm splitting hairs I'm just saying that the account they're citing here as the reason say that people thought it looked like Joseph and sounded like it's not really there because this isn't a miracle the speech this is just yeah it's not this is someone getting a spiritual confirmation from a speech that this is the person that should lead the church because they feel that this that Brigham Young is going to leave the church like Joseph Smith did as opposed to Sydney Rigdon wow that's really powerful yeah follow the footnotes we need to have weird Alma create a song it's a parody yeah yeah all right let's go to the next slide yeah and so you know that just to kind of put a cap on this you know the use of Emily hoyt's account is a Masterwork of bad apologetics and as we just said you know it does not fit with the description from Saints they look like Joseph Smith because if he did what did Emily mention that she needed to look up at the stand to make sure it's not Joseph and then not mention that it looked like Joseph and so Saints is going to claim that Emily testified and I quote how much he looked and sounded like Joseph on the stand yet when you read that actual account she states that she looked up to make sure he doesn't look like Joseph Smith and never says anything otherwise and so um it's important to sing like we said not how only how this went from an ordinary speech one of the most miraculous events not just a Mormonism but his religious as a whole um but you know just being able to see how it grows and so um as we talked about earlier in the episode there's a lot of infighting among the different branches of Mormonism and so the brighamite branch was the largest in in numbers and all the branches are fighting for the claim of the authority and the mantle of you know the prophet of God and many of these entries are written with the hindsight that they followed Brigham Young And Thus needed to be in the branch that was the one true and Living Church and so there's a lot of motivated reasoning here and that's not to say that they're intentionally fabricating stories I mean obviously some of them are as we've already noted um but that our memories are are largely shaped by the hindsight in order to convince ourselves and others that we made the right choice and so as Emily notes in her diary Sydney rigton made a speech and claimed to have authority to leave the church others had similar claims I think I meant lead none appeared reasonable to me and so she's saying in her diary that Sydney Rigdon made a speech and it didn't seem reasonable that he should be the leader and so you know Emily her experience is shaped not just by the event as it happened but by seven years of members talking about why they followed Brigham Young across to Utah instead of the other break-offs during this succession crisis and this also helps to explain how the story began to grow from from this point to also claim that Brigham looked like Joseph and even talked with the same hissing s because they're now trying to convince not just themselves but other people that they are the true sect of Mormonism that has the authority from God and so there's a lot of things happening here but it also um kind of shows the motivated reasoning that we all have when we're trying to convince ourselves that we made the right choice yeah so what's our Theory as to how this happens I I know we're kind of speaking to it speaking around it but if if if this miracle didn't take place and if the miracle began with with something seven years later that someone said or wrote in a journal does anyone want to summarize kind of how Collective group memories how this Collective group memory likely formed if it wasn't from the event actually taking place I'll let Mike jump on that I I just I think it would be speculation to try to do it I mean I think there's um if I remember correctly uh Radio free Mama did a podcast about some of this stuff and I think there's actually a second Miracle story about Brigham Young like they're in a house and they're talking about how the 12 is going to lead and there's like some lightning bolt that comes at the right moment that everyone knows means Brigham is is to be the one and and someone said that's kind of a later later recollection too but I'm not real uh that's something I have to look into because it's been a long time since I heard it but I I honestly I feel like it's one of those things where you have seven years of all this in fighting between all these sex and Mormonism and they're trying to find any way they can to justify why they are the one true and Living Branch of Mormonism and so I think that maybe it was something where people are just talking and someone mentions the detail and someone's like oh yeah I remember that too and then then someone else kind of UPS it a little bit and it's kind of like you know again we'll talk about this a little bit on these Whispers right yeah it's a telephone change except in this in this in this game you're remember you're trying not only to convince yourself that you would join the right sector Mormonism but you're trying to convince other people that they should join your sector Mormonism so of course you need grander and grander stories so that when you're trying to do missionary efforts especially if you're doing missionary efforts where they're hearing from other branches of Mormonism it's like no no this is why we are the one and so I feel like whether or not I don't think that like the the 12 are sitting in a room you know twisting their mustache going oh my goodness how are we going to trick these people I think it's something where people are trying to convince themselves as well as convince others that they made the right choice to join this church go all the way across the country have family and friends that died along the way and now they need to convince themselves not only that they made the right choice but that this guy who's leading this church who I would argue is kind of a monster is actually the right person um from God and I think that that is something we all I mean we've seen it over and over in in our lives where you know people who are in bad situations who convince themselves that they're in the right situation even though from the outside we're all like dude this is not a good good place for you um so I feel like it's kind of like a human emotion to need to find ways to justify what you did and and to try to find like a direct Foundation as to why they did it I think that would be kind of real speculative enough yeah and then just to kind of repeat what I referenced a tiny bit earlier the way memory works is you know something happens or something doesn't happen but if if something does happens it it is something that gets stored and um but let's say in this case it didn't happen but then this woman Bears her testimony one time or a leader gets up and recounts a story and he tells it and then everybody listens and then they store it but then every time you uh discuss or remember the memory what you do just like in a computer situation you retrieve the memory it's an active memory and then you later restore it but if you restore the memory and then you just happen to add a thing or two to it kind of like a fish story where it gets embellished over time and it grows and it grows and it grows or like the first Vision story where it's told one way but then with changing Doctrine changing theology it goes from you know the Lord to God and Jesus it's sort of like you retrieve the memory but then you have to reconcile it with your new theology so you put heavenly father in there along with the Savior and then you store it again this whole process of storing the memory retrieving it adding some things to it and then re-storing the memory and then retrieving it again over time not just allows the um the story to change over time it allows other people to eventually insert themselves into the story because that's just how memory works yeah and I would add also that when you listen to and I I think we've all experienced this at some point and I've heard a lot of people talk about this too with church but it's not just church but when you have someone who's leading a group and they need you to believe and to be faithful and to be energetic and enthusiastic sometimes they may hear details of a story and then they go you know what I can use that to get people to feel the spirit in this case so I mean it could be something that there were leaders who heard these little you know Emily Hoyts thing which is real generic and they might have said you know what um did you guys know when Brigham Young spoke that people saw started to see Joseph Smith and then all of a sudden the people that are being told the story they start repeating it and then they start it you know like you said it's kind of like a the fish story the telephone game whatever you want to call it it's all I don't necessarily know that it started as some nefarious thing I'm just saying that we know it didn't happen and then we know that within seven to ten years it went from nothing happening to kind of well there was a little bit where we got a spiritual confirmation to not only do we get spiritual confirmation we got a visual one we got Joseph Smith on the stand and I I just feel like you could see that with church today I mean I think uh referee Mormon actually recently might have done a podcast where he talked about how he heard these stories uh from his I think Mission president and then later on he found out that the missionary person had taken him from like a movie or something and so you just you know people do stuff with that with stories because they not that they feel like I'm gonna go dupe these group people but it's like I know a story that's going to get them to really feel the spirit and really feel like they're in the right place even though they know it's not technically true and I just feel like those things lead to cementing it as a real event I wonder whether you could look at it in terms of how people are driven by the outcome of the situation they want the social situations people come into them wanting to achieve a certain outcome the outcome that people telling this story want to achieve is that their position as following Brigham Young is validated as the right decision both to themselves and to these other people and so that is the thing that must remain fixed and other things can be fluid depending on what the desired outcome is so they can they can be more fluid about the story it can be embellished and they don't feel like they're lying because it their their ultimate good is well people need to feel the spirit and if you're telling the story This Way gets them to feel the spirit and makes me right and makes them believe that I'm right so they'll join me that's more important so yeah I think that's a big element of it for sure yeah all right well let's go to the next slide yeah and so you know I said at the beginning of the episode what a big aha moment this story was and this is part of the reason why because you know this is not an uncommon experience throughout history and so you take the evolution of this story of the Transfiguration of Brigham Young and you look at the other important stories in church history that we have covered already in these overviews and so the first first Vision was written about 1832 uh 12 years after it was claimed to have happened and even setting aside that Joseph Smith never mentioned the first Vision to his family or friends during those 12 years in the next six years the story would evolve from one personage to two as we talked about and it was using a common um experience that was written in Joseph Smith milieu there were I think three dozen um that Richard Bushman had found um and so all of a sudden these stories evolve in in a way that matches Joseph Smith's Theology and then the priesthood restoration was retrofitted and evolved in in much of the same way and so we covered this in our episode on the priesthood restoration but the original 1829 Revelation does not mention the multiple multiple priesthoods nor does it contain any mention of Peter James and John there's no development of the Melchizedek priest until years later and Joseph Smith does not even introduce a high priesthood until 1831. um five years later Joseph changes the original 1829 Revelation to include the miraculous event of Peter James and John bestowing the Melchizedek priest said to Joseph Smith and Oliver cowdery so in just five years the story went from a revelation that was effectively about the authority to baptize to a miraculous event with Peter James and John conferring a higher priesthood to Joseph Smith which elevated his status in the church above all all others at a time when he was having his authority question so we have two stories here that are genuine Miracles that we have at least some earlier reminisces of to know that they're being embellished uh ingrandized and in some cases completely fabricated in order to serve a purpose Kellogg Nemo said where Joseph Smith may have been saying hey you know what the first Vision didn't happen but I need them to to believe it happened in order to feel the spirit and join the church I'm not saying you know we can't say whether or not Joseph Smith sat in a room and said oh my goodness I'm going to pull the wool over their eyes I'm just saying we do know that he's embellishing and changing the story once you see the Transfiguration of Brigham Young and you could see how easily a story can go from hundreds of people witnessing nothing to being with one of the biggest miracles of all time all of these other stories start to make a whole lot more sense as to how not only they were able to be created when all these people around Joseph Smith are like I never heard of these things but to be accepted as truth just within a few years and I'll just add we you know we'll put in the show notes links to the LDS discussions episodes on the first Division and on the priesthood restoration because those are those are Classics and they're really really important and that's again why we say this series Builds on itself and it's best to watch this all in succession Nemo anything before we jump to the next slide no I think that's really well put okay yeah and Mike if that weren't enough you're gonna tell us now that the Bible has similar challenges yeah I mean and this is one of those things too we you know we've done episodes on biblical scholarship in Mormonism and I think that this is another way to look at it which is we look at the New Testament um they were all written between 30 and 80 years after the death of Jesus and they're being told by different communities through oral tradition before being written down by um the anonymous gospel writers and so when you look at how stories change in early church Mormon history it becomes easier to understand why biblical Scholars have identified many contradictions in the gospels and how some stories were even landed added in later by Scholars uh sorry they were added in later by scribes such as the woman taken in adultery in the Gospel of John or the long-ending of Mark which as we talked about the long-ending of Mark appears in the Book of Mormon even though it was not original to the text and um that also tell tells you when you look at the fact that Brigham Young's story went from absolutely nothing miraculous happening to an absolute miracle in seven years the gospels were all written down 30 to 80 years after the death of Jesus and so you have to then think about that's 23 to 73 years longer than Brigham Young and these are all being told orally there's no contemporariously contemporaneous written journals from you know the death of Jesus so everything is being told orally for all of that time and now you look at it with the same lenses bergame you're like okay now I can see how these Miracles grow and grow and grow until they're written down and um we talked a lot about the you know the first five books of the Old Testament in our earlier episodes as well they were written hundreds and thousands of years after the events are supposed to have taken place and so as we covered in the Adam and Eve overview um the story was not even known to the earliest prophets of the Old Testament because the story was not written kind of written in the in the current form until about 600 BCE when those first five books were compiled and you know as we said this this is made clear by noticing there are zero references to Adam and Eve in the early books of the Old Testament when you think of how long these stories were told orally and how they used a surrounding mythical stories and then they're passed out from Generation generation it's really easy to see why the global flood myth resembles the earlier flood myth of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Tower of Babel story resembles both earlier Sumerian and Assyrian myths and as we talked about in those episodes you know these stories from the Bible need to have happened in a literal way for the Book of Mormons you know truth claims as being historical and from God to be true and and so now you start to look at this and you go okay well now in this case you know in seven years Brigham Young story went from nothing to Miracle the Old Testament you've got hundreds and thousands of years being told without any document Trail and so of course you're going to have stories that are not even meant to be historical that are being passed down and now in Mormonism are being cemented as historical love it um all right and and I'll just throw in uh a reference to an amazing Tick Tock Channel and YouTube channel that have both emerged over the past year so there's an amazing uh believing Mormon scholar named Dan McClellan who uh has been tick-tocking about a Biblical historical criticism now for for over a year and he's just launched a podcast in a YouTube channel I think it's called data over Dogma yep but I can't uh recognize uh I can't recommend um Dan mcclellan's stuff enough if you want to hear a believing faithful Mormon scholar who knows more than all of us combined about the Bible talking validating everything you just said Mike about the Bible you can check out Dan McClellan stuff and we'll be sharing that in the show notes Nemo anything you want to add I'm not one to shy away from my own weaknesses I have to say that biblical scholarship is an area that I'm I'm particularly I don't know a terrible amount about to be honest but I can see what you've laid out there Mike and how we start to see that I guess what I take away from it is we start to see this is not a unique position it's not a unique thing to be happening within the LDS church happens in the Bible as well it happens in religious Traditions human beings will ultimately storytelling um people uh creatures we we want the way that we managed to get better was We Invented systems of writing and then we were able to record things more accurately because the brain isn't like a computer where you can just reach in and retrieve data every time so yeah when we're doing oral storytelling Traditions things will change yeah and we talked earlier in this episode about how everyone who's telling these stories has a specific need and so if you're in the brigamide sector Mormonism and you're going out and you're doing missionary work it's really valuable to be able to say we know where the true break off of Mormonism because God made you uh Brigham Young look like Joseph Smith and you know when we talk about the gospels of the New Testament you know in the early church you've got people going out and preaching about Jesus and if you're going to people who are not familiar with Jesus you need stories that are going to resonate with people to make them feel um you know the spirit and to make them feel like they want to join that church and I'm not saying that the New Testament is completely made up I'm saying that within decades there is a lot of room for these stories to be created and told and the best example is the story which I realize is not like a true Miracle but uh the woman taking adultery in John they know from looking at early manuscripts is completely a late late edition which doesn't take the value of it away I'm just saying that there's a lot of time for these stories to be kind of changed based on what the people telling these stories need for their communities whether it's to get them to feel the spirit whether it's to get them other people to join the church and that's why it's really important to try to understand why these Miracle stories might be created and to be able to look at what we do know from a historical basis to make a better evaluation as to what you want to do about them because every religion obviously has Miracle stories that predate Mormonism that are a lot harder to evaluate because they don't have the Contemporary evidence all right so should we jump to the next slide yeah and you know we talked about why the story is so important to Mormonism and you know the point of detailing you know these events is is that you can see throughout history how Miracles often develop long after the events happened and as we just mentioned with most of these examples there are no contemporary writings to compare to but with the Transfiguration of Brigham Young not only can you see that the event became miraculous without ever being spoken of at the time but that some members of the church claim to witness it when they were not even present and so just to be perfectly clear here there is not a single contemporary account that talks about the Transfiguration of Brigham Young ever happening and there are many accounts that describe the event without a single mention of it happening um just not from the writer's perspective but if anyone else there as well and so you know as we said that there's hundreds of people there so not only you know if I was there and I didn't see it not only did I not see it but I'm not even mentioning that other people were talking about it so do you really believe that something that miraculous could possibly go unmentioned by everyone in attendance on something of such incredible importance as to who to lead the church after Joseph Smith and the Transfiguration because of that is a pivotal event not just you know in church history because it's not backed up by a single event in um any contemporary contemporaneous account out around the event whether it's a journal or a publication or a newspaper and as we mentioned earlier we have Orson Hyde lying and again maybe it's not intentionally lying but he's certainly misleading about being there in a general conference talk when he wasn't even there yet and that again should cast further doubt or at least skepticism on other Miracle stories from the early days of the church and so um van Wagoner in his dialogue article sums us up in his article he says since these things are myth and our church has permitted them to be perpetuated might not the other fundamentals to the actual story of the church the things in which it had its origin might they not all be lies in nothing but lies and I think it might be a little bit blunt and straightforward but the point is once you realize that the Transfiguration of Brigham Young is made up and perpetuated by the church even though they know just as we do that there's no contemporary accounts whatsoever how then are we supposed to continue to believe all these other Miracle stories which have the same problems are not going to suffer the same fate as just being a completely made up event it's fair yeah I mean what I take from that is I don't think it's ever fair to to look at something like that and say right so because this one uh incident seems to be made up or seems to have been um elaborated or blown out of proportion therefore all the others are wrong too I don't think that's an intentionally healthy way to approach it I think what we need to do is when you realize something like that isn't true you go okay so I'm now going to look at the other things like it other miraculous stories from early Mormonism and I'm going to analyze those as well with the view now that they may not be true not just looking at them to try and prove them right but looking at them as though they may not be true because you've noticed that one thing like that was able to not to be true so it's it's about creating a possibility in your mind that something could be untrue rather than using that to then label all the other things as untrue as well you have to go through and look at each of them that's why we have a series that's this long yeah yeah and Mike I I was at a a roller skating event for post-mormons uh here in Salt Lake City just last night uh put on by the faith Journey meetups Group which is a a Facebook group for like 10 000 post-mormon women it's an amazing group uh Chelsea Homer leads it with her board they have an organization called The Lost and Found club which you can find at lost and found.club where they hold uh regular events for postmormons along the Wasatch Front and during this roller skating event uh I met a couple last night that is just in love with this series and the point that they made is the point that you mention a lot which is it you know what apologists try and do Mormon apologists is they try and attack each individual issue in isolation and try to either create plausible deniability or explain why the problems with the particular issue in and of itself aren't necessarily a problem and I think what we're all trying to say here is don't base anything off of one data point but what you do need to do and what we're doing over this series is we're covering 50 data points and or 100 data points or 500 data points and what you need to do is look at each data point and then pull them all together aggregate the story based on all the data points and then make an informed decision yeah that's what LDS discussions really does a good job and you need to decide which which ones of those are important to you uh and you need to also decide how many is enough you know like how you you will you will get a feeling with yourself and it'll be different for everyone how many of these things is enough to make me go okay I'm not sure I need to look at any more now because I've looked at the ones that are important to me and I've looked at enough of them and that's different for everyone I think yeah it really is the um I always think of it I I'm not the first one to say it by any stretch but it's like the do you do you look at the church history as like uh smoking guns like do some people will look at the book Abraham like he got everything wrong I'm out but then some people like no no we can make that work and then you get to DNA you get to plug so it's like smoking guns are Death By A Thousand Cuts and and really it's like which one and everyone's different and some people it really does like I've talked to people and I know both of you probably have where they're like yeah I hung on for years because I knew these problems but then all of a sudden every time I got a little bit deeper I found two more problems and two more problems and um and the one thing about the series that I tried to do with the overview project on on the site is you can find answers from apologists in every one of these but the question is when you get when you apply those answers across the board are you creating more problems elsewhere and usually the case is yes and that really shows that your your argument is pretty weak if it's going to create problems elsewhere it's like you know it's like you know you need a car repair and you're like well I can fix this car by putting this part in but it's going to blow out the back end of your car and you're like well that's not very helpful but you're still going to fix that one part and I think that's really um where apologetics doesn't even care to to go because they they know in their head I can't apply the same answer to this other issue but they don't care because you're asking about that one issue and so it really is about like Nemo said you you look at it and you say what what's enough what's not enough and you know one problem does not make everything false but it does give you the tools to then look at the other problems with A New Perspective and say okay now I can look at the first Vision using some of the stuff we learned from the Transfiguration of Brigham Young and apply it there and does it fit does it help does it hurt and obviously everyone's going to make their own decisions but I do feel like that is the the part of the series and the part of doing this on the website that I thought was helpful to me which was to try to layer it so that as you get further along you can go oh that makes the 116 Pages even more problematic or the 116 Pages makes the composition of the Book of Mormon more understandable and obviously everyone's going to do with that what they want but yeah I do I agree with with the people you spoke to that I think is the biggest problem that most people in the church who do come across these problems don't understand is that when you read the Apologetics it doesn't work once you start to pull back and look at the bigger picture and to see if if they can be applied to everything uniformly because usually they cannot yeah so that takes us to the last slide yeah and you know we've kind of gone through this but you know we talked in our episodes on biblical scholarship a lot about how Adam and Eve the global flood the tower Babel are kind of considered ideological myths which is a way to kind of give Like An Origin story for a group of people and so in a lot of ways the Transfiguration of young is the ideological myth for the Brigham white branch of Mormonism which is the way to say why are we here why are we in this branch of Mormonism after Joseph Smith died and and the Transfiguration is is the reason and so just as these ideological myths in the Bible this is the myth that people rallied around in Utah to feel um more assured that they made the correct decision and now they have a miracle story that they can rally around even if it was invented long after the fact and so um the implications of the story are going to make any believer a bit uncomfortable especially if you're in the brighamite branch but they really do help to make these other issues make more sense and so as we keep saying and kind of just referred to a minute ago when you take these problems in totality the puzzle pieces are going to begin to fit together and we no longer have to kind of smash them together with like the hammer of apologetics and you know again is is that website that we've kind of referenced LDS answers said if this Transfiguration never took place the very foundations of our LDS faith in history are weakened and they're right and it's because once you realize this event never happened you begin to understand just how weak Brigham Young's place as the next prophet of God is and it begins to show you how all of these miraculous stories could be created after the fact to bolster Authority and charismatic leaders just as we saw with Joseph Smith you know whether it's the first Vision the priesthood restoration and all of the different kind of claimed visitations from God Jesus angels Elias Elijah and all that stuff and and then once you start to peel that layer back it just really shows you how easily people can believe in stories that aren't true feel the spirit about stories that aren't true and and that leads just to I think um an uncomfortable feeling in all of us but it in a weird way it's like I said at the beginning from a from like a dorky nerdy perspective this story was one of my biggest at home aha moments because it really helped me to understand even though the story might not feel like a big deal in Mormonism but it allowed me to see all of these things in a much more um I guess a better perspective because you could see how it happened you could see how these people they weren't gullible idiots they just were people that felt something and just went all in on it and you know they just didn't know any better and I think we can know better and so now it's about applying this stuff however you want to do it but I think this is a really important story not just for Mormonism but for religious modern religion as a whole yeah absolutely all right well that's the episode for today I hope you all enjoyed it I hope you aren't disappointed that it uh that it wasn't as significant as maybe we built it up uh to be Mike anything you want to talk about uh up the upcoming you know we only have like five episodes formally left on our LDS discussion series but we also have at least a list of 10 other possible additions to incorporate I know that you usually take the Summers off so we're probably only going to get another five out of you before we at least take a break for the summer anything you want to say about the you know what's coming up uh well we've got um some episodes that are going to kind of start to wind up everything on spiritual Witnesses which I think will tie a little bit into this how the church kind of handles doubt with members I think we have one about apologetics there's another episode which I think is actually kind of a really cool way to look at this which is if Joseph Smith got it right who got it wrong and I think that's a really good episode in terms of um trying to kind of flip all of this upside down and say okay let's just say you got it right then what who's getting it wrong on these other big issues and that's an important one we have one on apologetics and I think we have one that kind of wraps up so um we've got some good stuff left and then and I think um while we're on a little bit of a break we can have anyone submit some topics they'd like to hear about we're going to try to pick some and um because there are topics I wanted to get to that I just never got to on the website and I know John had some and some people have sent some so we've got a list that we're working off of but we'll definitely try to get to some of those more um either specific topics or you know there's some more broader topics we never really did episodes on so there's a lot to come and and at least we've got five more which I think will be really useful because as we've talked about like the first like 38 Episodes are all early early church and these last ones are going to be more about modern Church um more about our beliefs um apologetics and stuff I think it'll be a little bit more of a light-hearted uh well maybe not lighthearted but it'll be uh maybe a nice change of pace I guess from the early ones so we got some good stuff left and then like I said people can send in um suggestions and we can kind of regroup at some point and try to figure out which ones we want to do all right uh and Mike do you want to talk really briefly about your vision for a PDF or a book just in case there's people out there that might have ideas on how to help you get that going yeah so one thing I've been working on on the side and I haven't gotten terribly far just because of time and all of that is to take the overview project on ldsdiscussions.com and condense it down as much as we can into a PDF file that can be downloaded it wouldn't be meant to be a replacement for the CES letter because that's that's its own thing but it would be meant to be effectively a very very shortened PDF file that covers all the topics we've been doing in the series and have a lot of links back to the longer topics on the website so we're just trying to think of ways that would make that helpful to people because obviously I don't want to there's no point doing it if people don't want to read that but it might be a way that you could read it download it read it when you have time maybe it's something you want to share with people who are more open to it um so basically it's more of a question of do people actually want that and if you do um you know you can let John know you can email me at LDS discussion no s gmail.com just let me know and then we'll try to find the best way to make it as short as possible while not leaving out too much info that's been my struggle as trying to condense it to where it's still kind of hitting all the points without being too long but that's something I've been trying to work on in my head for like the last year or so to kind of cap off this project to make it accessible to people especially if they don't want to go through 39 long topics uh this would be more like you could read like a two-page uh say two page for three pages on the first vision and at the end it would say click here if you want to read the full article and then you could say oh I want to read that but I don't really want to read the long one on you know DNA or something so hopefully that would help people that are trying to dip their toes in as opposed to diving All In and so if somebody wants to help with that they email LDS discussion no s gmail.com is that right yeah yeah someone got LDS discussions at gmail yeah but yeah so yeah or you could you know you can you can message me uh like on Twitter at LDS discussions um you sent me a direct message or whatever and just let me know um if that's something you'd want to see and if anyone has any thoughts on like what would be effective as far as um length and all that stuff too because it like I said it's hard because I don't want it to be four times as long as the CES letter um because I realize a lot of people have said the Cs letter is too long and I don't think that's the case but um I just I want it to be as helpful as possible but also I don't want to have it be so short that from it like from an apologetic standpoint you're like oh he's leaving this out and it's like I'm not leaving it out I'm just not putting in the PDF so I'm trying to find a way to kind of you know cross all the t's without making it unbearably long so that's the thing that's the challenge all right that sounds great Mike Nemo any final words no I just want to bemoan the fact that Americans summer holidays or vacations as you call them are so long who needs 12 weeks off school what's that about yeah you know I mean it's it's a nice time to have uh time off and um you know that's why we won the war is it now right okay that is why the American Revolutionary War happened don't you remember it wasn't about taxes without representations about summer break I don't know I see oh you missed that over there yeah well we'll know better next time I apologize to everybody for that horrible joke and I'll just say please subscribe to the Mormon stories podcast YouTube Channel please like this episode please share it please follow us on Facebook but also check out Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel check out his uh donor box link I'm trying to remember if you have a patreon or not anymore uh I do I don't I don't upload any extras to it it's just another way by which people can donate if they like yeah but check out the good work of Nemo the Mormon and of all the britvengers there's so much good work going on within Mormonism and post-mormonism in the UK yeah so do your best to support all the good channels yeah we're smashing it out here in Europe we're about to look at a French documentary so you know we're getting cultured which John featured in yeah that was fun some British some French journalists came to Mormon story Studios last I guess late fall early winter interviewed me and I didn't know if it would see line of day but apparently it has so it has if you speak French you can check that out yeah yeah all right thanks Nemo so great to have you on and again thanks Mike you're the best thanks everybody and uh again check out the website LDS discussions.com for these essays check out this podcast either uh on Spotify under LDS discussions or on the Apple podcast app uh or on integrated in the Mormon stories podcast feed or you can check out our playlist on YouTube named LDS discussions because this series is amazing and it changes lives uh thanks again for joining us today on the live stream please good please be good to each other be kind to each other and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon stories podcast take care