How the Church Handles Doubt

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon stories podcast I am your host John delin it is uh May 11th 2023 Balenciaga and we are here today uh to talk about how the Mormon Church handles doubts this is a part of our ongoing series that we have named LDS discussions uh if you go to LDS discussions. comom there's an amazing series of essays that have been written by our dear friend Mike about uh Mormon church truth claims trying to be as evidence-based and as uh and as objective as possible to help people who are trying to uh understand and learn the truth about the Mormon church to do so in evidence-based fact-based as neutral as possible manner we are now uh 44 episodes into this series it does build upon itself so what we recommend is that uh if you have not watched the other 43 episodes or listen to them that you pause that you go back and start from the beginning because you'll get a lot more out of today's episode if you uh listen to the previous 43 you can uh listen or listen to or view these episodes in series uh either on Spotify under the LDS discussions brand or uh on Apple podcast under the LDS discussions brand or on on the Mormon stories podcast YouTube channel we have a playlist for all the LDS discussions episodes so that's how we recommend uh consuming them and uh yeah this has been a very very popular series and we're really honored to have um Mike with us so Mike welcome welcome back to your series how's it going good how are you all doing good and Nemo Nemo the Morman from the Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel is joining us from the UK hey folks how's it going it's good to have you Nemo great to be here yeah and uh two of us have been Balenciaga but one of us has not and I'm just going to leave it up to the audience to try and figure out what we're talking about yeah indeed we'll just leave it there I think we should all right so Mike anything you want to say before we jump in no I mean I think this episode will'll we'll picky back well off our last episode which was on spiritual Witnesses and kind of it's a good continuation CU today we're going to look at how the church frames doubts and how they kind of present the idea of doubts to to members in in this episode is going to be almost entirely it is entirely basically on current modern Church we're not going to look at how Joseph Smith talked about doubts we're not going to look at how Brigham Young did it because I think this is something we're all going to face and if you're watching these episodes you likely have face outs whether or not you're still a Believer or not and I think it's important to look at how the church frames it so that we can better kind of like we talk about spiritual Witnesses just better understand what they're saying and how we can kind of utilize that when we're trying to figure all this out for ourselves yeah that's great um and this is a really important episode because honestly growing up in the church I think it's fair to say I was taught doubt not um that doubting is bad and I think one of the things I've learned over time is that uh there's an argument argument to be made for doubt being a very healthy thing um and I and I hope we are able to get to that at some point but I think let's begin with slide one which is a look at how the Mormon Church handles doubt yeah and this is just the obvious right doubts in the Mormon Church are nothing new we have stories of members leaving the church since the beginning uh when they realize that that the truth claims don't add up whether it's the Book of Mormon or the actions of Joseph Smith that eventually shook their belief we have examples of Joseph Smith losing members over the Kirtland safety Society Bank where he l everybody's life savings in a bank that he had prophesied would be the biggest bank uh obviously we have the stories about polygamy we have all these other stories and the biggest difference really is that in recent years the Mormon Church really has no control over the information we have access to and so you have the different Outlets you have the CES you have Mormon stories you have all of these social media um Outlets whether it's Tik Tok or Facebook or Instagram that are bringing information to members in very easy to consume formats and I think that's a really big difference between now and when you look at say the church in navu and kland they didn't have uh the ability to hop on Google they didn't have the ability to hop on and look at some of these documents that Joseph Smith had that he was claiming or that he was changing such as Revelations and so ever since especially since the internet has made access to this information so readily available the church has been faced with increasing doubts among members and um the past church historian Marlon Jensen declared maybe since Kirtland we've never had a period of I'll call it apostasy like we have like we're having now um the internet's made it easy to find this information and it's now easy to find it with clear sourcing you can no longer say that you know Joseph Smith changing the first vision is an anti- Morman lie because we could show where all of these documents are coming from same with the priesthood restoration all of these things and when you have the actual evidence in a lot of it coming from the church's own records you then are going to have more and more members with doubts yeah and if it's okay I'll just give a little bit of History here because i' I've been in the church the longest I'm 53 years old I was you know I did my Seminary years in the 80s in the mid 80s and if I can just give a little bit of perspective going back that far you know I think um I think that there in the let's just say in the early 20th century if you go back to the Shannon Caldwell Montes episodes uh there were some there were some you know events like with BH Roberts with uh the New York Times publishing some articles about the book of Abraham in the 19 teens let's say and with some science stuff coming out around Evolution and the age of the Earth and dinosaurs the early to mid 20th century there were lots of opportunities to doubt but um things really really heated up when Fon McKay Brody uh around the mid 19 40s uh who was the niece of David omay published a a biography about Joseph Smith called no man knows my history that I think that is the first time the Mormon church was confronted with uh its first wave of serious doubt and uh of course F McKay Brody who is Again David O M's niece was was e was excommunicated within a very short amount of time and while that book was published nationally by a reputable publisher um because she was demonized and excommunicated because you ni wrote um a response to her book called no ma'am that's not history um and what what you saw oh Nemo's gonna Nemo's showing U both the book no man knows my history and the response no ma' that's not history um because they were able to demonize F Brody and excommunicate her you know that book became uh an unspeakable it became something that you just weren't allowed to read and so for at least a few decades after that you didn't see big up surges in doubt within Mormonism and you but you also saw the beginning of of real uh what I call Classic Mormon apologetics starting with hbi and then what you have is you have uh Sandra and Gerald Tanner in the early 60s um you know coming up with Utah Lighthouse Ministries and of course we've had Sandra Tanner on Mormon stories now multiple times but Sandra and Gerald are legends because they worked for half a century uh doing really good scholarship and research on Mormon church truth claims and Publishing a gazillion books and pamphlets but again they were they were kind of coralled by the Mormon Church successfully into this anti-mormon sort of cage where you just uh you just knew to stay away from the Tanners because the Tanners were evil and so again the Tanners were um you know knowledge about the Tanners was successfully constricted and confined plus you had to go to Utah there wasn't the internet at the time so you'd have to go to utlm to buy their pamphlets or buy their books The Church Controlled the bookstores and so it was really hard to get a hold of their information so that was kind of a second wave that the church kind of was successful at putting down the third wave was sort of the emergence of dialogue magazine and then Sunstone magazine and then the Sunstone symposiums and again that wave really Rose in the 80s and early 90s and the church got really concerned about that um because it started to really get critical mass I think at its height Sunstone magazine would have like 10,000 people attending there's some annual Symposium 10,000 subscribers to the magazine I'm making those numbers up not making them up but I mean that's what my memory is about uh where those numbers reached um but the church then uh came out with a policy denouncing uh uh you know symposia attendance and they excommunicated ultimately several participants from dialogue and Sunstone in the infamous September 6 um uh excommunication blood bath of of September 1993 and there were several other excommunications before and after that including Margaret Tuscano and and Brett metcafe and others David Wright in addition to the September 6 so again uh another s Resurgence of Doubt emerged that the church was able to beat down and so the church did a really and then the church sort of invested in farms which was a anti- which was a Mormon apologetic group to beat down doubts that was sponsored by BYU and then eventually Farms turned into the Maxwell Institute which still exists to this day more or less it really isn't really doing much apologetics these days but I guess what I'm trying to say is that's a bit of a brief history of uh Mormon doubt and uh and of the churches being successful at beating down doubt where things changed was in 2004 2005 when uh the internet the Mormon internet really came online first in 2004 with uh Mormon blogs like by Common consent times and Seasons feminist Mormon Housewives and then in 2005 uh Mormon podcasting really emerged which started there were some other podcasts before Mormon stories but I think it's safe to say Mormon stories was the first really big and popular Mormon themed podcast and then of course several good podcasts and YouTube channels have emerged and Tik Tok channels have emerged since then but since 2005 the church has not been able to put the doubt Genie back in the bottle and we saw this massive emergence of uh information uh which which started out with Mormon stories and Mormon think which was an early website that predated the CES letter uh but Mormon think was a really important website and it still is then we saw other podcasts like uh Mormon expression feminist Mormon Housewives year of polygamy Etc and by 2013 2014 the church was being handed its lunch in terms of Truth and uh massive defection not just because of the truthful history and truthful science that was being shared and the social justice issues that were being addressed but also um people just feeling betrayed like the church had lied to them and betrayed them and that's what led to the gospel topics essays to Marlon Jensen and the things that you mentioned Mike and so the gospel topics essays come out in 2004 14 as a way to respond to the internet handing the church its um its lunch so to speak and uh and so that's um you know ever since then and and unfortunately for the church I don't think the gospel topics essays really helped I think the gospel topics essays along with uh Richard bushman's book rough Stone Rolling only caused more and more church members to doubt into question and so uh that's left the church reeling in terms of how to handle doubt because classic apologetics just failed to work once the internet really came online and we've seen the decline of the Maxwell Institute the Eraser of farms and the irrelevance of people like Dan uh Daniel Peterson and Lou Midgley and others and um and now we we're left with sort of what we call Neo apologetics which is like uh Terell given and and Fiona given and Richard Bushman and Patrick bason and people like that so I know Mike and Nemo you guys weren't expecting me to do that intro but but most of the people enjoying LDS discussions are really really relatively new to all of this they've just been tuning in in the past year or two and so I think that history might be useful to people U Mike please I hope Nemo did you want to jump in Nemo I was just agreeing with you but to say 2005 you said that was a significant date right that's when you know things really started to to ramp up would you say yeah it's interesting because in 2005 I was baptized oh wow at the age of eight so you could say that these things may be perhaps correlated yeah yeah you're like it's like is that is that like I don't want to call you the Antichrist but like are you prophesying your birth and your baptism as like a sign of the times for the end of the modern Mormon church is that what you're saying some have said so so you're okay being referred to as the modern anti- Mormon Antichrist again it has been said amongst the peoples this it's nothing I've not been called before all right that's good to know Mike anything you want to add to that I hope you're okay with that in I mean it's good because I think like my my when I was doing the website and I was doing the overview project um and I got to thinking about doing a section on doubts my focus was on the modern-day stuff just because it really does impact every member today and as we're going to see more importantly the thing that really kind of gets under my skin a bit is how these messages are mostly are are more regularly directed at at the youth and I think that is where you could kind of see how there's some manipulation with with the way that doubts are handled but on on the same token it's good to have that background because yeah doubts are are nothing new to the church like like I said at the beginning a lot of people left the church over polygamy a lot of people left the church over Joseph Smith's um Kirtland safety Society uh bank failure a lot of people left the church after Joseph Smith prophesied that they would retake Missouri and then that failed I mean you always have had doubts Joseph Smith was always under um questions of authority and that's as we talked about in our earlier episodes that's why Joseph Smith was constantly revising Revelations to bolster himself whether it was the priesthood restoration um utilizing the first Vision all of these Miracle stories to really set himself apart as I am the guy I am him all you guys got back off um and and so John your background is good because it does kind of let people know that this is nothing new it's just I think more elevated now because of the fact that it's a lot easier to access the information whereas even um I'll give you a real quick story when I went through the temple the first time I was sat down by my in-laws and they said when you get to the temple there are going to be people with pamphlets and they're going to have all sorts of of um accusations against the church and Joseph Smith do not take the pamphlets all of these things have been discussed all these things have been answered they're all lies and I believed it because I believed in the church and I'm not saying every one of the accusations on that pamphlet would have been true there are you will see an anti- Mor material stuff that really is not true or at least I I don't believe is remotely solid enough to to take credibly but um I guarantee if I had had one of those pamphlets from back then I read it now I'd like yep that's true yeah that happened yeah that happened and and the difference is that 20 years ago that information wasn't really easy to find in a way that you could say oh yeah not only did it happen but we have real sources today you could you could go online and I'm not even just saying LDS discussions you know my website but Mormon think or you know CS letter letter from My Wife and you can look at the sources that they're all there and most of them are coming through the church's own record so it's important to have that background so that as we talk about it now people don't think that this is somehow something new yeah yeah and I think if I want to also summarize what I was trying to say is the way that the Mormon Church used to handle doubt is to basically excommunicate anyone who expresses public out and then to warn everybody to stay away from any information that wasn't approved by the church and the way that the the way that the internet changed that was number one uh excommunications stopped you know ceased to Be an Effective tool to silence people because it didn't silence Jeremy Reynolds it didn't silence Kate Kelly it didn't silence me it didn't silence a lot Sam young it didn't silence Bill reel and in fact it probably emboldened many of us who felt unfairly treated and who felt like we were fighting for worthy causes it actually made us more emboldened and I think it honestly grew our following uh when the church was able to excommunicate people in decades past it kind of silenced them and what they were standing for for for you know for the rest of their lives if not for many decades um but then the other thing is the church warning people to stay away from anti-mormon literature of course they still do that now but it became less effective because if people have their cell phones if people have their mobile phones if people can secretly listen to a podcast or get on their phones they can still consume material secretly and they don't have to go to a library to check it out or like be reading a book that somebody can ask what book are you reading the internet makes it much easily much more easy to access and ex to access information to become aware of information um than than it was ever possible to do before uh so yeah so it's easier to to learn about information to access information and to hide your consumption of that information and I think all of that's really important in terms of understanding how the game has changed okay uh anything else you want to say before we jump to the next slide uh I'll just point out that what you just said is the illustration of I don't know if the this counts as a fallacy but the striesand effect is that whole idea that if you try to if you try to quiet someone it actually ends up giving them more exposure and so I think you saw that with um I wasn't really into the deep dive when you got excommunicated but when Bill reel did when Sam young did the media coverage the extra exposure among people in the church who heard about it it only creates more problems for the church and I guarantee um if I had been doing this series with you five years ago the church probably would have come to me and tried to discipline me but no one's come to me I'm still a member of record so I guarantee that a big part of that reason is the church learned very hard the striesand effect is is not an effective way uh it's not an effective way to to silence people anymore because the people who are talking about this um members of the church a lot of times don't know about it and they go why are they excommunicating uh this guy for for doing a Blog just covering church history and then all a sudden you're like oh that's why so yeah I think their their approach now is to try to make people afraid of looking at it cuz that's really all you could do because once they see it it it it's likely going to lead the person to either have a more nuanced belief or to leave all together and that was actually something we did by Design you know I uh and this is probably getting off topic but when I had my exchanges with my State president when Kate Kelly was being called in in in 2014 for her work with ordaine women we took it to the New York Times and we staged sort of visuals of and protests where we were going to turn these excommunications against the church because we I was still active in the church my kids were active in the church we were trying to help improve the church from within so we felt like it was unjust for the church to to be silencing us and excommunicating us so what we did is we made it as unhealthy as possible for the church to excommunicate in silence it's critics or it's truth tellers and so we started holding vigils for people like Sam young for Bill real for Jeremy rynolds and all was getting the media involved and like you said with The Strand effect we made it very very and same young we made it very very painful for the church to um excommunicate us but more importantly we turn the the excommunication the disciplinary councils into a PR nightmare for the church that uh was so effective um that the church changed the name of of disciplinary councils uh to something like membership reviews and uh you know they they even changed the name excommunication to something like withdrawal of membership yeah that's what it is just doing whatever they could to soften uh our our ability to punish them for for acting unjustly because who's going to argue that Sam young young was wrong trying to keep bishops from doing one-on-one interviews with 12 12y olds are asking them sexually explicit questions who's going to argue that the CES letter or Bill reel or Mormon stories you know wasn't sharing a more accurate view of Mormon history than the church had been for two centuries who's going to argue that women don't deserve a better status in the church uh who's going to argue that LGBT people don't deserve basic human rights including the right to marry very few people now but but look at all the people that were actually communicated for fighting for those things anyway uh we weren't planning on all that Nemo did you want to add anything cuz you're you're doing a little bit of of activism these days as well yeah just thank you to you guys because I've not been excommunicated because I think they've realized it's not fruitful so I can continue to push and push and push and push and do what I need to do to try and make the church a healthier organization um yeah thanks in part to people that have been excommunicated and made a big deal out of it so I think the church is looking at your and bills and and looking at me and going we don't want to repeat of that so hopefully I know there was an excommunication just a few weeks ago of that guy who wrote that musical about the church and its finances do you guys know about that um I I heard he was excommunicated but that was it yeah so it's I don't think we're totally out of the excommunication woods yet I know the church is excommunicating people on the far right for for for like Denver Snuffer like things still but anyway yeah now that we now that we've discussed that I think that I'm glad we talked about it even though it wasn't planned but um let's go ahead and go to the next slide how the Reynolds described having doubts about the church yeah so this we're going to do a number of slides here and this is a talk that was given in January of 2019 and this is a youth face to face so this was do you want to talk about who the renins are just because ex Mormons or or never Mormons will have no idea okay so so this is uh Dale renin and he is an apostle of the Mormon church he is ordained a prophet Seer and later and when they do these new devotionals they always have the husband speak along with the wife um the wife obviously has no power or say or authority in the church but they do this because it presents a more um you know it it looks equal when they're both talking even though they're not at all equal as we've talked about um and so basically this is someone who is a a high leader in the Mormon Church giving a devotional worldwide youth devotional to kids and so this was a believe on a Sunday night I think and all the kids are taken to their local Ward and they can watch it or I'm sure you can watch it like on BYU TV maybe or something like that and I I just I want to emphasize the fact that this talk is being given to kids and these are kids who are very impressionable they're very young and they're looking at Dale renland as a prophet Seer and Revelator of God okay so uh anything else you want to say before we launch it just to say this is uh this whole talk is about doubt and it's called navigating doubts in faith and as you'll see throughout these these little Clips we're going to play they have very childlike illustrations um they make that they they really try to emphasize to these kids that if you decide to have doubts or leave the church you are this kid who is going as you'll see as a spoiled little brat the moments he starts to notice anything wrong and so the message of course is to stay in the boat but as you'll see in these clips the kids decides to have doubts and you're going to see how the church kind of animates that that uh the expressions for the kid that decides to have some doubts all right let's play it let's roll the clip as you begin to revive and start feeling better you begin to pay attention to some things you hadn't really noticed before the water from the canteen is a bit stale and not what you would have preferred like Evon or perier the crackers tasted good but what you really wanted was some delicate Tes and meat followed by a chocolate croissant you also notice that the fisherman wears worn boots and blue jeans the sweatband on his hat is stained and he seems to be hard of hearing you note that the boat is well used and that they're dense in the right side of the bowel some of the paint is chipped and peeling you see that when the fisherman relaxes his grip on the rudder the boat pulls to the right you begin to worry that this boat and this Captain cannot provide you the rescue you need you asked the fisherman about the dents and the rudder he says he hasn't worried about those things because he's steered the boat to and from the fishing grounds over the same route day in and day out for decades the boat has always gotten him safely and reliably where he wanted to go you're stunned how could he not worry about the DSE and the steering and why could the nourishment not have been more to your life the more you focus on the boat and the fisherman the more concerned you become you question your decision to get on board in the first place your anxiety begins to grow finally you demand that the fisherman stop the boat and let you back in the water even though you're still more than 20 km or 12 mil away from Shore you can't stand the idea of being in the boat with sadness the fisherman St stops the boat and helps you back in the ocean you're on your own again well consider this story is a parable in which the boat represents the church and the fisherman represents those who serve in the church okay well what in the heck is what in the heck is wrong with that Mike unmute yourself if you don't mind yeah it's just so manipulative you're telling these kids who are watching around the world that if you decide to look at the doubts about the church or you come across something with church history that's just a little scrape and paint it's just a little Nick on the side and it really puts the blame on you because it's like you're the problem for not seeing all the greatness within the church and this is a very well-used tactic and then they show the kid he looks like a total spoiled brat like stomping his feet and then you know they put him back out in the water and of course the shark swimming around is the world the world right or Satan and the worldly stuff and you know the fisherman looks all sad when he let let them go back out there it's just it's so manipulative because you're telling kids right at the start of this talk this is you if you decide to have any questions about the church Nemo you were you were cringing and shaking your head well I have I have three points to make first lack of access to every on water is not my problem because I have it right here uh second what an irresponsible fisherman to just throw a child back in the ocean what's that about and then third okay he says well he's got to and from the fishing ground in his boat this whole time and it's been fine so he's never worried about those things what they're trying to do is minimize the concerns of the boy by saying they're cosmetic they don't really matter and what they're then implying is that the concerns that people have about leaders of the church are similar that they're just cosmetic they matter that the leaders of the church ultimately achieve their aim what is the aim of the leaders of the church to bring Souls into Christ except the concerns that people have about the leaders of the church do undermine that aim because they alienate the lgbtq community they alienate those that come from incomplete families or they have done in the past they alienate women they alienate so many groups of people that actually the concerns that the boy was pointing out are not cosmetic it's a false it's a false Parable it's a false analogy because the fisherman was able to achieve his goal but the church is actively being stopped from achieving its stated goal by the concerns that people are raising about the church thanks Nemo I also I also want to add something sort of an analysis of the church's strategic efforts here they kind of their strategy when when Marlin Jensen was shopping around you know one of the most you know I referred earlier to the BH Robert stuff I want to tell everybody to please check out the Shannon Caldwell Montes EP Montes episodes uh about the secret Mormon meetings of 1922 with BH Roberts because that's a a really crucial example of how the church handled doubts in the 1920s when the church was put on notice that things like the book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon were not historical um and when when a a strategic General Authority appears to have lost his faith in the Book of Mormon um that's a really important episode what I also want to talk about is is uh another really important uh Mormon stories series of episodes were about the Swedish rescue um because in the in the mid to late uh 2000s to to the early 2010 there there broke out a movement of apostasy in Sweden um with with an area Authority named Hans Matson who was an area you know an area Authority for the church who lost his faith and was willing to talk publicly about it came to the New York Times and then eventually came on Mormon stories podcast that was a really watershed moment for the church and at that point this is prosel topics essays Marlon Jensen and the church historian uh the assistant church historian Richard Turley started going on tours trying to use factual history to resolve the doubts of questioning Mormon adults and I have it directly from Marin Jensen that he found that the efforts to talk to adults about uh problems with the Mormon Church doubts with the Mormon Church problems with the Mormon Church Church's truth claims that that he had virtually no success once someone had Lo once an adult had lost their faith and felt uh deceived and and disillusioned by the church Marlon Jenson himself admitted that there was pretty much no value in trying to bring an you a Mormon adult back who had lost their faith and so what the church decided by the mid2 you know 10s was to completely Focus their efforts on the youth and so what you'll see is emerging by 2015 and later these secret stake firesides where only youth were allowed to attend and literally the parents of Youth Mormon youth were asked not to attend and were excluded from these firesides and then Apostles would come to Stakes or to multi stakes and try to indoctrinate the youth and uh and and that's this this clip that you just showed with the renins it's no accident that it was addressed to the youth it's in a youth devotional because it it it the the Mormon church has realized it has lost its ability to persuade adults to come back once they've started doubting so instead they're trying to inoculate the youth by seeding uh youth curriculum CES Church education system curriculum with um apologetic uh you know inoculating um narratives about doubts and church history and Truth claims and this is all part of that effort now now Mike and emo I don't know if you guys want to add anything to that but I think I think that's a really important thing to mention is is just the church's focus on the youth because it knows it's lost the adults Who start doubting it's like they realized they can't there's a b the dam has burst and they can't push the water back in they've actually just got to try and stop it coming out you know they they've just got to stop the youth leaving because they can't push people back in yeah yeah and and that you know the one thing the only thing I'll add to that is just when they released the first Saints book which um I believe it was 2018 was the first Saints volume uh and they did a lot of a lot of interviews with um Church owned media and all that and I think it was the church historian but it might have been one of the leaders of the church but they said that the Saints book is meant to be inoculation that was the word they use because they want if um if you read it as a 12-year-old and all a sudden you're 17 and you hear about the book Abraham being wrong you're like oh I've heard of the book Abraham issues Saints doesn't give you those details but they give you enough knowledge about the info so that you could say oh I've heard of that and walk away I mean I've had so many people over the years they'll go um I'll say do you know about um the issues with the book Abraham oh yeah I've read it all and I'm like well what do you have to say about faximile 3 oh yeah yeah I know all that that's fine he didn't actually translate that I'm like what about the Egyptian characters that are on the top where it says these characters say oh yeah yeah then they then they go away they they they don't want to deal with it because you have this limited knowledge and so the church I think is is trying to as you said seed this very limited knowledge within them to inoculate them and then you just hope that when they come across more deep info they say I know about that and walk away and that that's really what this is yeah all right well so yeah that stay in the boat analogy is is really interesting it's kind of juvenile it's kind of insulting and yet that's you know that's what the church is doing and you know I guess we could it's Up For Debate as to whether or not they're going to be successful with it right should we go to the next slide yeah and on the next one we could just Let's uh play the clip first and then we can talk about it after okay so is this just a continuation of this just another clip from the same talk yeah we have a few from this talk just because it's it's a pretty rough talk all right let's keep it going path what did the boat and the fisherman teach us about the church do dents and peeling paint on the church change its ability to provide the authorized saving and exalting ordinances to help us become like our heavenly father if the fishermen must hold on to the rudder with both hands to keep the boat on course does that negate his and the boat's ability to get us safely and reliably where we want to go you do not have to be an ordained Seer like my husband to know that slipping back into the water instead of staying in the boat is risky okay so they're basically saying it's risky we we talked about this in our episode that we recorded yesterday right kind of implanting fear um uncertainty and doubt and kind of teaching learned helplessness which is basically to say be very very scared if you if you leave the boat if you leave the Mormon Church likely bad things will happen to you right is that the point you wanted to make there Mike well there's also a direct appeal to Authority because you're saying you don't need to be an ordained uh propheter and Revelator like my husband to know that getting on the boat is going to get you eaten alive by the Sharks right and so she's making very clear that you listened to my husband and um we kind of touch on this on the last slide but they're making this point of like um and this is a quote do dents and peeling paint on the church change its ability to provide the authorizing authorized saving and exalting ordinances to help us become like our heavenly father and the problem is as we've touched on these are not cosmetic issues and they know that you know we've talked about how Joseph Smith used the exact same methods for Treasure digging uh to claim both to get the gold plates and to translate The Book of Mormon we've done episodes showing how Scholars can date The Book of Mormon why IAL scholarship tells us the story cannot possibly have happened in any historical way and that's before we even get into the DNA studies and so the problem for the church is not dense and peeling paint that's this whole idea of Trying to minimize what Joseph Smith did his his little mistakes you know and it it really reminds me of I think we talked about this in an early episode if you've ever seen the movie Office Space um the whole idea in office space is that they're trying to have like this little scheme to take just a tiny bit of money off every transaction so that eventually it builds into a big amount that they can B basically steal from the company and no one would ever notice but they have a little error in the calculation and so all of a sudden after like a day or two it's already like 200 Grand or whatever it's a lot of money and they're in the car they're panicking and the guy's like why do I always do this why do I always screw up some mundane detail and um I think it's Michael Michael Bolton yells this is not some mundane uh no actually it's it's he's yelling at Michael Bolton Michael Bolton in the movie and he says this is not some mundane detail they're trying to tell these kids that everything you hear about the church is just some small tiny thing in in reality it's not d and pealing pain it's the foundation of the boat that is completely not what it claims to be and so they're trying to minimize this to keep you afraid of it when they won't actually tell you what people are actually talking about Nemo what would you add I think it just goes to the point that I was making earlier that they they're trying to minimize the faults and and call it fault finding when in reality if these things are undermining the stated aim purpose and truthfulness of the organization then they are significant um and so they need investig in you shouldn't just ignore them yeah this this whole idea of of changing the narrative from you know the Joseph Smith restored the the truth and translated The Book of Mormon and got priesthood Authority and set up God's one true church on the earth and had the witnesses and and revealed scripture like that that was the Mormonism that that 200 years of of converts and or people born into the church that was the narrative that was sold to us that's what fueled the church for so many years and to see the church pivot to forget all that history stuff history isn't what your testimony should be based on you just need to focus on the present and the saving ordinances feels like a bait and switch and that's I think that's why the church um has felt like it's lost adults because so many of us who were indoctrinated into caring about Joseph Smith and the witnesses and the veracity of the the church's scriptures and the historicity of the church's Scriptures it it um it's not flying to say these are not the droids you're looking for uh move along this is not what's important anymore and instead to try and shift and just say you need the ordinances um that's just that's just not going to fly the only other thing I'll just say is it was weird for me given what what we've covered in previous LDS discussions episodes about what it actually meant to be a sear the the peep stones and the hat and and scrying and Joseph Smith looking into a sear Stone and Oliver calry using a water divver or looking into a sear Stone to uh to know what is really what Joseph Smith really meant by sear and then to have sister renland refer to her husband as a modern sear did that strike either of you as kind of weird or or not yeah it's it's the evolution of that term over time in the church but it was also just massive psychophony wasn't it that she was just kissing up to her husband it's the same as when Wendy Nelson will say you know uh my husband is he's a man Unleashed he's this he's that uh put put an exclamation mark after everything my husband says and a question mark after everything anyone else says um this is it's uncomfortable but yes John to your point it is a it is very weird that those words are still used those titles are still used but the function of the people is not the same yeah anything else Mike no I mean just when you cast a prophecy and Revelator the first thing I always want to say is what have you prophesized what have you seen what have you revealed and the answer is nothing nothing and nothing so I mean it's just an empty title at this point yeah yeah all right should we go to the next slide yeah all right right and so this is more of this talk uh from the renins and um it's just another clip that I think is important because it's going to tie into our last episode about setting the equation and if you set the conclusion um then you have to change the variables to fit your predetermined conclusion that the church must be true all right let's roll the clip when you start with the question could these things not be true it leads to a beginning of faith that if nurtured grows could these things not be true is a question that presumes that it's true for instance if I say aren't we going to drive from Honolulu to the North Shore it presumes we're going to drive the question urged by Moroni that we ask concerning the Book of Mormon is one motivated by faith and therefore leads to more faith if we instead start with the question couldn't these things not be false it leads to doubt and doubt never leads to Faith all right Nemo what's your Nemo's cringing what do you want to say about that Nemo unmute yourself maybe I don't I feel like I've lost the ability to form cogent sentences now after listening to that that was that was wild um why because because the way the way she phrased that could these things not be false it's it's already a strange wording to say uh are these things not true um because it depends on where you put the emphasis in the S as a written sentence that question could just as easily be the inverse of what she's implying is it's just like well it's possible they're not true it's just a simple interrogative she's imply she's she's doing this weird semantic emphasis where she then implies that it it it involves an implication that these things are true and it's the burden of proof is on the person to prove that they're not but in reality the actual question just is simply well are they true or are they not and you just got to work it out yeah it it was weird it's very strange Mike Mike what do you want to add just I mean imagine going up to an eight or nine or 10 year old kid and being like hey I'm Jim Jones I run the people's Temple and I want you to join me and um if you have any doubts just ask could this Jim Jones guy be true don't you dare ask could this Jim Jones guy be false if you did that the parents those 8 to 10year old kids would be like get away from me you sick whatever and instead we're watching this talk and I guarantee there's parents sitting back they're going yeah and it's like this is horrible this is so manipulative and as Nemo said this is not this is not about faith at this point this is about setting the equation so you cannot get to any conclusion except this church is true and that is just a really bad thing to teach kids who are super impressionable trying to figure things out and you're feeding this garbage into them because you know it's more effective if they hear it now than as you said if they hear it in their 20s when they're already going yeah this doesn't make sense and and so it's just to me it's really manipulative and as Nemo said it's really clunky and cringey in the way she frames it and I'll just add there's a really good book that we'll put in the show notes called doubt a history The Great doubters and their legacy of innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson it it it's a really important book because it just shows how important doubt is and I would even argue with their basic thesis that doubt always leads to bad things and that doubt can't lead to Faith it's the church's own argument that Joseph Smith's doubts led to his faith and belief in the restoration um Jesus doubted the the Pharisees and the Sadducees and that led to a renovation of Judaism into Christianity and of course science begins with doubt not with doubt that just wants to destroy and dismember doubt that wants to lead to Greater truths and and further light in knowledge so I would argue that doubt is not only essential to human development but doubt is is is uh an essential ingredient to more enlightened faith and I think that people like Terell given and Richard Bushman Etc and Patrick Mason would actually agree with me Nemo but that's where the church plays a semantic game because I say Smith didn't have doubts he had questions and questions are fine because what they do is they try to frame doubt in a negative light to say that to doubt is to think negatively of something whereas in reality to doubt is simply to have reason to think something may not be true and so to be skeptical to to have doubts is to be in a state of skepticism which isn't always negative uh and it's very often healthy as you've pointed out but that's where the church will take that Joseph Smith argument away from you and go no no no Joseph Smith didn't doubt don't you dare doubt Joseph Smith had questions and questions are fine mhm yeah all right Mike should we go to the next slide yeah let's go to the next one okay um this one I think is actually worse than the last one so that'll be fun okay all right once you set it up uh this is basically what they're trying to do now is to put the blame on this kid in this this Parable uh for having doubts and and they're really in my in my opinion going to twist a knife on anyone who wants to follow this kid's example to study church history um to basically Poison the Well for the Youth and inoculate them as we've said against outside material and this really this section is designed to let these very impressionable young members of the church know that people with doubts are not only ungrateful unruly children but that these kinds of doubts are simply unacceptable in the church and so they're really going to mock those who go down the rabbit hole of church history and start discovering how many problems there are um because it's really effective to keep people in the church if you basically can make those without seem toxic and so um as we're going to find out they're they're really leveraging and kind of weaponizing a child's desire to uh appease and and make their parents happy um by basically telling them this is how you're going to make your parents happy so don't you dare do this other stuff and I guarantee you um with my my kid right now he's at that age where he he would not want to do anything that would make me unhappy and I guarantee a talk like this would be very effective on him and so I I really particularly hate this clip especially in the context that it's being given to kids all right let's roll let's roll the clip on one occasion while attending a state conference a state president asked me to visit with a man whom I'll call Steven Steven had been a faithful member of the church he had served a mission and had married in the temple he had served Faithfully for many years but began to have doubts about the church as I visited with Steven he said that he had concerns about about the fact that Joseph Smith related four versions of the first Vision he thought this might mean that Joseph Smith made up his experience I put Steven in contact with a man who had researched these four versions decades earlier Steven visited with the researcher the next time I spoke with Steven I said so how do you feel about the first Vision he said well I feel okay about that because my questions have been answered that no longer bothers me and I'm just I'm going to pause it and let our listeners who aren't viewing know that a cartoon of a like a gopher popping out of a hole with a mallet that had like a picture of Joseph Smith in the like a drawing of Joseph Smith in the first Vision appears on the Mallet so this feels like a whack-a-mole kind of setup because there's like seven holes in a field a gopher pops up with a mallet and the Mallet has the first Vision on it and I just wanted to make sure our listeners who aren't viewing know kind of the infantile animation that's being displayed uh as this talk is going now I'll just continue the the talk as the Gopher popped back down in his hole after I guess the I don't know after the first Vision issues were were uh resolved we'll continue now I'm really concerned about the polygamy that was practiced in navoo and after the Manifest in 1890 that's really troubling me and now the Gopher popped up in another hole with a little animation of of a man and two women so it's kind of giving this idea of gophers popping up out of multiple holes with multiple issues all with them with a sign in their hand okay we'll keep hey John yeah John the video is not on the screen right now sorry I just want to let you know okay okay there you go all right we'll pop it back was it before it wasn't until that last with the polygamy thing so okay now now we'll pop it back okay I asked stepen to visit with someone who had researched these topics in reliable primary sources after that discussion I contacted Steph and asked how he was doing he said well that doesn't bother me anymore I understand what happened and my concerns have been resolved but now I'm really concerned that the priesthood was withheld for a time from those of African descent s sadly Steven had chosen to be a Perpetual doubter for him doubting pleased him more than knowing and he was digging up in doubt what he had planted in faith as time went on as one concern was resolved another one was found no matter how many how much anyone tried to respond and answer these questions he found another topic on which he was anxious he focused on the dents in the boat instead of on the capability of the boat to lead him to the blessings of the atonement of Jesus Christ what Steven was doing is a form of church history whacka mole you know the children's game where a mole pops up from a board and as soon as you hit it another mold pops up in its place yeah oh so much to say all right Mike do you want to tell us why you don't like that and then Nemo and then I'll share first of all I'm going to tell you how scripted these stupid talks are she pauses for laughter there at the end she's waiting for that laugh line from the crowd because of course it's hilarious that somebody could be concerned with all of these different problems with church history I that annoys me so much when you see these kind of scripted talks where they pause for laughter especially at the expense of people who are trying to figure these things out and it just really shows that in the Mormon Church they don't want to give you the info they don't want you to look for the info and then when you do and you start realizing these problems just keep going and going they put the blame on you because they're saying it's your fault for looking these are not dents on the boat polygamy is not a dent on the boat the book of Abraham is not a scrape in the paint um the DNA problem with the Book of Mormon the anachronisms the King James language which they could not possibly be in the Book of Mormon all these things are not dents these are the foundations of the church and so this is trying to minimize and really you know make it seem like it's a a childish thing to have these doubts and to to give this talk to kids to to make them laugh at people that have this kind of a problem it's just it's just so like again if you saw this from another religion you'd be like this is a horrible place because you should not be teaching kids to be afraid of researching The Very church that they're expected to dedicate their life to and yet here we're doing it and the crowd's laughing at it all right Nemo well where to begin um they the line about him being a Perpetual doubter who took joy in these things is ascribing motive and it's actually far more likely that he was troubled by these things and it wasn't particularly joyous for him to have to deal with all these questions um when they kept saying now I have a problem with polygamy but now I have a problem with the peace ofan they're insinuating that he's in this continuing state of looking for excuses and it's that phrasing that implies a timeline but now I found this but now I found that in reality Steven may have had all these questions and concerns all bowled up in a list ready to to ask but he only gets a chance to ask about one of them at a time with an apostle so it's not that he's oh now I found another one now I found another one they're all there all these problems exist it's not Steven's fault that there are so many different problems that exist in relation to the church he's not just looking for them you know that's that's what what I'd say about that really is is that they've implied this timeline of okay well now I'll look for something else problematic when in reality he May well have had all these problems in the first place and they've just come back and asked him if everything's okay yeah yeah Pro I love all that Mike and Nemo and I'll just add a few things to use to use the metaphor of wacka is problematic because when someone plays ma wacka it's a game that game makers designed and then you play wack-a-mole as a participant in a game but to to put the doubter in the position of a w game implies that number one it's a game and number two that somehow it's been designed with intent and and I can speak you know there probably aren't many people in the world not not to boast there probably aren't many people in the world who have spoken to as many doubter Mormon doubters as me just because I've been doing this for 20 years almost full-time and nobody engages in their faith deconstruction by Design these people served Miss these people gave their lives to the church these people were Elders cor presidents and Bishops and state presidents and area authorities and relief society presidents and young women's presidents they were victims not designers it was it was the church that designed a structure where information factual history about the information has been withheld from the membership if ever there were a game designer the game designer was the church to intentionally withhold information from the membership and if you don't believe me just look up the the you know the story of BH Roberts and the secret Mormon meetings of 1922 look up the story of the excommunication of fwn McKay Brody look up the story of how the Tanners were treated and how apologists were were lifted up in the 60s 7s and 80s to disingenuously beat back the uh legitimate critiques of the Tanners look at the September XX Communications look at all the ways the Mormon church has and the the Leonard Arrington administration of the 1970s and 80s you know read about Leonard Arrington and and the way that the church history Department was um was disassembled between 1972 and 1982 and you'll realize that the designer is the church the victim is the person who's trying to play whack-a-mole but in reality it's not a game it's it's the farthest thing possible from a game from the standpoint of the well-intentioned member that reaches adulthood having served a mission paid their tithing made lifelong in in in many cases death Oaths of commitment to the church through the Mormon Temple ceremony giving their everything to the church only then to find out they had been sister emically misled so using the wack-a-mole metaphor is just so fraught and problematic uh because in reality the the best metaphor to use is somebody who spent their life savings on an automobile and they needed the automobile for transportation not just to get to work but to but to transport their family whom they loved you know uh throughout daytoday then to find out that Not only was the was the transmission uh breaking down but but but cylinders were destroyed in the automobile and the tires were flat and uh you know it the windshield wipers didn't work and the airbags were faulty would would anybody you know if if if somebody had purchased a lemon it's a term in the United States if anybody had purchased a truly defective automob would anybody fault them for bringing to notice of the seller that there were multiple legitimate problems with the automobile the tires the transmission the engine the radiator the cooling system uh you know the the the safety system the airbags nobody would fault a consumer for raising legitimate issues with a legitimately um defective automobile and and and and yet when it comes to several legitimate issues like is anybody going to say that Joseph Smith's polygamy and polyandry is not a legitimate issue after watching the LDS discussions issue of the priesthood restoration is anybody going to say that those aren't legitimate issues and and talk about the you know the problems with the Book of Mormon Book of Mormon historicity book of Abraham historicity all of the problems that a modern Mormon is going to bring up with the church nobody's going to say those aren't legitimate issues if they look at the issues and yet they're demeaning legitimate doubters who have multiple concerns they're just sort of reducing them to Childish people that are just playing a game that want to find problems with the church and that are having fun and even finding joy in raising these legitimate problems and and you know and referring to them as DSE in the bow versus like a more apt Naval metaphor would be the Titanic where people are discovering you know that that there are fractures in the structure of the ship because the ship has hit a Iceberg and the ship is about to sink and everybody on board is about to die in a sense that would be a more apt Naval metaphor to use than just to say it's just some chipped paint and some dents in in the bow and a and a sailor or a a captain who didn't shave you know what I'm saying Nemo and Mike anything you guys want to add I'm being a little bit uh I'm being a little bit strong here because I feel so strongly about these issues well the the way you add to that metaphor is to say that while that's all going on rather than doing anything to resolve the problems with the vessel the leaders of the church is simply rearranging the deck chairs yeah no that's that's very very apt anymore I got a couple points I want to drop in I'm sorry one I think the whack-a-mole apology is actually a lot better for apologetics and we've talked about this in all these episodes because the tactive tactic of apologetics would be to say the reason that the Book of Mormon and acronis are okay is because Joseph Smith used a loose translation and that that immediately drops down back into the ground because then when you say well okay if it's a loose translation why do we have all these things that need a tight translation then another thing pops up that says well it's a tight translation because of this drops back down to the ground and so apologetics is all about you not being able to connect because they're trying to jump from issue to issue we've talked about this throughout the the series and I I really feel like that is so much more of an appropriate comparison there than it is to doubts about church history because what we're trying to do in the series particularly is to take them all at once I want all of those boards up at once so you can look at them all together I don't want what the church wants you to do which is to take out one issue time that's point one point two is um this idea that someone with doubts pleas it pleases them more to doubt than to know is just the most absurdly abusive and manipulative comment and uh a good way to to do it be say you're in a marriage let's just say your name is Joseph and your wife is Emma and Emma starts to realize that that Joseph has been gone a lot and he's being seen around town with a lot of girls and he's got people that are are lying on his behalf and Emma starts saying Joseph uh I thought I saw you with Lucy the other day uh with the door closed what was that all about and he's like Emma dear my beloved Emma no big deal you're like okay I guess maybe it's not a big deal and all of a sudden like a week later Emma's like uh Joseph I saw you walking with one Partridge sister in the afternoon but then another Partridge sister at night and at both times your clothes seemed a little bit off it it looked a little suspicious he's like Emma why does it please you more to doubt our marriage than to know that our marriage is completely faithful it's like I I feel I know people are going to say I'm you be factious I am but when you start telling people when they see real legitimate problems with actual evidence that it pleases them to find this stuff they are full of crap it did not please me one bit to find out I remember the exact moment that I had the courage I finally gave my P myself permission to go onto Google and start looking up some of the problems I I kind of knew about it it pissed me off it made me mad it made me so angry because all of these things I was told are not true at no point that I go yes I am I'm not so happy that this isn't true it's it's it's a way to tell these youth the youth that people who leave are these happy people to tear this down and that is the opposite of what it is and it's so manipulative and it's abusive to tell kids you should not have doubts and that you should not ever question these things because you would never apply that to anyone else and I don't mean to rant I'm just saying this is being given to little kids and to frame it this way is so disingenuous yeah yeah it's a problem um okay should we go to the next slide yeah I might as well okay this is more from the same talk yeah so the next the next slide is framing is that right framing doubt that leads you away from the church as evil or is that we discover that okay no no this is it all right go for it Mike yeah this is from the same talk and this really calls back to some of the stuff we talked about in our last episode about always saying that you have to stick with trustworthy sources you can't go to people with doubts you can't go to people that don't have doubts but aren't part of the church and um it's ridiculous and it really is uh as they say painting those who research the church is blind like the mole um that will turn into a lazy scholar and keep that phrase in mind for later in this episode uh which leads to doubts are evil the Redlands know full well what they're doing here and the intent is to keep the youth that they are talking to afraid to look at any sources that are not deemed trustworthy as they explicitly say reliable trustworthy sources and they're also trying to get people to be afraid of those who come to them with problems with the church all right let's uh let's roll the clip said doubt unless changed into inquiry from a reliable trustworthy sources has no value or worth a stagnant doubter One content with himself unwilling to make the approp effort to pay the price of divine Discovery inevitably reaches unbelief and darkness his doubts grow like poisonous mushrooms in the dim Shadows of his mental and spiritual Chambers at last blind like the mole in his burrow he usually substitutes ridicule for reason indolence for labor labor and becomes a lazy scholar doubt is not wrong unless it becomes an end in and of itself that doubt which feeds and grows upon itself and breeds more doubt is evil Elder wiso's words are still true stagnant doubt does not lead to knowing the reality of the Savior Jesus Christ and his atonement it doesn't lead to knowing that we have a kind loving heavenly father who instituted the great plan of salvation we can come to know the truthfulness of this Latter-Day work but it requires that we choose faith not doubt and then we go to Reliable trustworthy sources for our answers okay uh Mike what do you want to say about that it it's just awful to call doubts evil um doubts are a good thing if you can doubt something and do the research and you come out the other side and you know that your beliefs or the thing you want to do it doesn't even have to be about your core beliefs but maybe you doubt taking a job and then you research you're like yes a really good company or you doubt as you mentioned earlier you doubt buying a car and you read reviews from other customers who have taken it for a test drive and who have owned it for a few months and you come out feeling more confident about your decision more happy about your decision to call them evil unless it leads you back to the church is manipulative garbage and they would never again would never ever apply this to anyone else but and they know it and I just I I think this is the problem with you know like a high demand fundamentalist religion which is to try to control the information that you have access to by saying only trustworthy sources that we deem trustworthy not that you deem trustworthy and then to call it evil when you have questions that don't lead you back to the church is just it's a horrible thing and I don't know what else more to say about that Nemo I find it really interesting the way that they kind of are making doubt and doubters synonymous like that they're almost saying that people are their doubt that's kind of seems to be how they're sort of treating it so what that makes then when he said that doubt unless turned into inquiry by trustworthy sources has no value becomes particularly Insidious because it could also it could almost be seen to imply that if you are a doubter you are worthless you have no value that state of being has no value it has no worth so change it and Youth and Young people already have enough trouble feeling worthless and and having those struggling with those sorts of self-image feelings particularly if any of those youth have questions say because they don't fit into the traditional sexual orientation that the church prescribes for example so then telling them that that state of being in doubt or or or or in turmoil about the church could essentially make them worthless I don't think is is helping anyone yeah I'll just add that um number number one it's crucial to understand what we've often referred to on Mormon stories podcast as the bite model it's uh it was developed by Stephen Hassen uh who we've had on Mormon stories so I'll refer you to those episodes but Stephen Hassen has studied how Colts operate and he's reduced it to an acronis called The Bite model where unhealthy organizations or CTS try and control your behavior but most importantly they control information uh so they control your thoughts and they use emotional manipulation uh to do that this this slide I think is a perfect illustration of how unhealthy organizations do that because what they do is they try and instill fear and uh they try and use insulting language if you if you look at the words that they use I just wrote down a few of the words Darkness poison blind ridicule indolence lazy evil those are all charged emotional words to make you feel either scared or afraid or insulted or to demonize and insult people who doubt so that's emotional manipulation and the that's the e in the bite model and the motivation is to make you uh the youth in in this case the Youth of the Mormon Church make them afraid um to learn so that controls the information such that the youth won't have thoughts which which in this specific case are thoughts or doubts that the church might not be true so that's what's going on here it's classic unhealthy organization cult manipulation to keep people from thinking and learning and the only other thing I'll do is I'll say I agree that doubt for the sake of doubt is not healthy or constructive but then my answer to that is who does that like the the tens of thousands of questioning and doubting Mormons that I've interacted with over the years they're not just doubting for Doubt's sake they're doubting to discover the truth because once they can discover the truth about the Mormon church then they can make they can go on to make healthy decisions like if they're gay well should I stop doing conversion therapy or living a life of celibacy or living a life that makes me want to die out of depression and maybe I'll go on to find true love and then get married and have a healthy happy life or they the the church isn't working for them they're depressed they're unhealthy and then once they learn the truth from their doubts they can go on to make healthy decisions about what career what education they want to pursue what life they want want to live who they want to marry how many kids they want to have what life they want to pursue um you know as a follow on so so this this characterization of doubting Mormons as just doubting for the sake of Doubt um but instead as what I've experienced which are tens of thousands of Mormons that question so that they can figure out what to do with the rest of their lives and to become to lose their depression to lose their anxiety to marry who they want to marry to live a full happy meaningful life that's the motivation for the people that I'm in touch with not just blind dark poisonous lazy doubt for the sake of doubt in and of itself uh do you guys do you guys you know have any reaction to to that Nemo yeah I mean that would be a pretty difficult sort of lifestyle and position to maintain because we kind of thrive on certainty in many ways in our lives so people don't want to be in that that life of termoil if you doubted everything all the time if you were a hypers skeptical all the time it'd be a pretty frustrating and difficult position to be in so I just don't think that's a realistic image to paint of any yeah I mean Nemo can I just ask you directly are you are you just doubting for the sake of doubting no so why are you doubting if it's not just for the for the sake of wallowing in poisonous dark evil doubt well it's cu the truth of things matters and to get to the bottom of the truth truth of things that don't seem to be what you were told they were you're going to have to doubt the things that you were told initially in the light of the New Evidence as is all it comes down to yeah yeah so for you you're doubting with what intent to get to the bottom of it to find out what the truth is to find out what's actually going on so that then you can do what whatever whatever that outcome would you know necessitate so you get to the bottom of it and you find out it's all and true so you act on that accordingly you know I don't necessarily want to say what that should be because that would be different for everyone but but would you say it's to live a a more informed happier healthier life in the end well certainly you'll be more informed and and you will be happy and healthier because that will be your goal for making the action based on the new information you find so because we all want ourselves to be happy and healthy I I would hope that's that's what I would hope we would is that your goal Nemo are you are you ultimately wanting happy healthy life yeah I don't want to be miserable I'm already British like that already makes that difficult so I'm doing my best to be happy yeah yeah that's your end but your end desire is is a happy healthy life not doubt for the sake of Doubt is that right no because like I said doubt for the sake of Doubt would be very uncomfortable right okay Mike how about you are you doubting for the sake of Doubt no I mean like I said it was it really was you get to a point where you just need to know and for me it was I had that moment just snapped where it's like go look you need to look and yeah it wasn't doubting for the sake of never was doubting for the sake of doubt I mean when you join a church if you really were doubting that much you wouldn't join and I I realize some people are born into it maybe there are people that are constantly doubting because they just can't quite grasp it but even then it's not doubting for the sake of doubt it's doubting because it doesn't add up and so I just I I like I said I don't know what more to say about this because it does feel like you know um it's trying to to Short Circuit your critical thinking and I you would never like if you went to a Toyota dealership and you test your and you're like I just you know what this got some bad reviews and then the the salesperson said you know doubt that doesn't turn into a sale of a Toyota car is evil and you just be like what dude you're you're out of your mind you know but here we're like I said we're all kind of nodding along going yeah that's that's good stuff and it's just it's not and I I don't know what else to say that's a great that's a great example if you're trying to find the best car for you and your family to say you know doubt that doesn't lead to a spefic specific end is evil who who's who who is renland or anyone to say what that specific end should be it should be what's what's best for the individual having what we call on Mormon stories informed consent because it may be that for some the healthiest happiest outcome is staying in the Mormon church and to be honest I'll just say full disclosure for me if somebody with all the information concludes that the Mormon church is the best choice for them for their their optimal health and happiness guess what I John delin am supportive of that decision Mike are do you agree are are are you do you agree with that uh to a point I think you know that's one of those things where it's like there there's implications that go beyond that so for example um this is given to youth right and so if you are a parent watching this talk and you know all of the true history let's just say you know it all and you're hiding that from your kids or you're you're called to but I gave the stipulation of informed conent when they have all the information if somebody has all the information and they're not making a decision under duress if they conclude then of their own free will and choice with all the information if they then conclude that the Mormon church is the best thing for them do you have a problem with that Mike again this is where this is where I'm trying to guess to make the differentiation to that answer no but those people are still going to basically continue the church's narrative which they know is not true if they really do know it all and so what I'm saying is if you know it all and you want to stay in the church yes but then if you teach on Sunday school or you give a talk and you say you talk about the priesthood restoration being done as a church said when they when you know it wasn't then no I don't think that's right and I think that's why I hate that this talk is being given to kids because I have a a family member who fully believes that people who are handicapped were less Valiant in the pre-existence they've said it they've said it in recent years I think that's horrific um and they're going to you know but but the problem is like do you do you teach your kids that do you teach the other people in Sunday school that and so I guess to answer your question there's nothing if you truly believe and you know all of this stuff and you're like I Know It All I've read all of it I really do like I actually do know I'm not just saying it and you want to stay more power to you but then if you raise your kids under the church's narrative or you teach it in Sunday school I feel like that is a problematic thing that can be kind of like a branch off of this decision and so there there's more to it I guess in my answer than just to say yes or no because it's like well then are you going to continue the untrue narrative the church teaches or are you going to be honest with future Generations because I think it actually be a great thing if you stayed in the church and you were honest with future Generations both in your own family and in your ward about the true history so that they can make better decisions but if you continue to kind of protect the church by giving their narrative then no I don't think that's a good thing so I'm not sure that's why I stipulated with everyone has full information no dur anded Ian if the yeah if the church let me go into a a a fire side and give a 2hour talk about all this stuff and and a lot of people are like I'm still staying in I still feel great like more power to you could do you want you could not do it in under two hours Mike no we can't even do a single episode under two hours Nemo what's your answer to the to to my question about being okay with people staying in the church if they have all the information I mean I'm apathetic to whatever people do with this information they can they can do with it what they like as long as they have it that's the most important thing to me is as long as they know as long as they're informed I I'm not going to start weighing in on people's personal decisions because there's just so many factors that are involved in the decision to leave or stay in the church that I wouldn't ever want to to speak to it too broadly yeah I think that's a the informed consent is the important part and as long as they have that it's fair game whatever they choose to do yeah yeah yeah I think that's right like you know and the one thing I'll add again is like I I don't I don't know how to phrase this but if someone comes to me and people have as you sure they have to you too John and Nemo and they'll say I know what Joseph Smith did with polygamy and I actually believe more because of it I don't respect that as an opinion now you could do that if that's what you want to do fine that's your life but I'm not going to respect it because I think as we talked about Joseph Smith used tactic tactics that are textbook grooming so I don't respect it but you could do with that and so I guess I feel like with this conversation I'm not quite sure how to answer it because I feel like as Nemo said there's so many aspects to it both as to why you stay or why you go and then from my perspective of why I may or may not have problems you know depending on how they're um you know furthering the stuff that we we talked about so it's it's such a tricky thing and that's why for me it's like you throw it all out there and people are going to do with what they want yeah all right well let's go ahead and go to the next slide which I think is is a really important uh extension of this conversation the mor you know renland basically teaching that the Mormon church is the only source for authority on Truth yeah and this is a video clip and if you ever saw this talk when it happened or any podcast about this was kind of a popular because it's just it's a very crappily ski scripted kind of like we mentioned earlier with like punch lines and so the renins are going to kind of use mockery with the youth um that they're talking to in order to make sure they know the only Arbiters of Truth in anything is coming from the church and so the Mormon Church Church yeah of course and the bromite branch of the Mormon church to to really make it specific and this is just an incredibly dangerous thing and we've seen this with other uh religious movements where it can lead to bad life decisions it can lead to just really bad choices but ultimately the goal is to keep members from seeking answers from outside the church and this is just an awkward delivery to accomplish it so if you've never seen this this is quite a uh quite a comedy act we've got going here all right let's roll the tape so would you seek Financial advice from someone who is broke and in debt would you ask for medical advice from a charlatan snake oil salesman who would you take some advice from on your on how to improve your forehand in tennis a weekend hack or Roger Federer so why would you entrust your Eternal welfare to those who are spiritually bankrupt because they have ripped up in doubt what they once planted in faith or who as Jeremiah said have forsaken Christ the Fountain of Living Waters and hewed them out sists broken sists that can hold no water these individuals have walked away from that Fountain of Living Waters and want you to trust in something that's okay John I think water all right brothers and sisters you can know all right that's called poisoning the well we didn't we didn't uh talk about logical fallacy that logical fallacy specifically but go ahead Mike yeah I just you know so I'm going to reframe their questions back at them and so I would say so would you seek advice on giving 10% of your income from a church that Hoards over $130 billion in an investment fund while not donating a single dollar of that investment fund to help those in need would you ask for marital advice from a church that champion polygamy until the government forced them to stop who would you take advice on from where dark skin comes from a church that wrote the Book of Mormon which completely gets wrong by people have dark skin or scientists who actually study why that happens and if you needed an Egyptian script translated would you go to egyptologists who have spent their entire life studying the language or a man who called himself a prophet that continually got translations wrong it's just you know I yeah well that sounds like the words of someone that's spiritually bankrupt there Mike yeah I mean that's the problem I mean I lost yeah I've been spiritually bankrupt for a long time but yeah it's just what's yeah speaking of bankruptcy I found it really interesting that like sure they were saying who would you take advice from some hack or Roger federa fine when it comes to tennis or a charlatan or an actual medical doctor fine again whatever but would you take Financial advice from someone who's broke bankrupt in debt yes I'd ask them how did you end up there and how can I avoid it because this is what the church fails to realize is you can learn from mistakes you can learn from when people get things wrong you don't just have to ignore mistakes you don't have to ignore When leaders get things wrong you can learn from them you can grow from them so Yes actually I would take Financial advice from someone who's broke and in debt by asking them what they got wrong so I can avoid it and I'll just and I'll just add you know number one I think it's bold that he even uses the word charlatan because if somebody knows the true history of Joseph Smith even even someone like Patrick Mason you know one of the church's foremost Scholars um and faithful Scholars at that you know when asked about polygamy uh he he wouldn't use the term charlatan because it's too polarizing but even Patrick Mason has has been on record publicly as saying that to him Joseph Smith's polygamy looks a lot like sin and if you if you realize that polygamy has been enshrined in the Doctrine and Covenants and this is why the Mormon discussion series the LDS discussion series it builds on itself unless you've listened to the the happiness letter episode on LDS discussions unless you've listened to the DNC 132 episode and you know that Joseph Smith lied about polygamy that he married 14year olds that he married other men's wives that he sent someone on a mission so that he could proposition uh you know his his wife which is the Nancy the mirinda help me out um help me out Mike what was the episode that that um so the happiness letter he sends Orson hide and then while Orson Hyde is gone he basically gives a revelation to Nancy mirinda Hyde to say You must basically um obey all that my servant Joseph has commanded then Joseph Smith a little bit later comes back and says oh by the way God wants you to marry me so yeah they get married and unless you watch the the book of Abraham episodes either on LDS discussions or with with um with scholar Robert Ritner unless you understand the problems of the Book of Mormon translation you know you're not going to understand that Joseph Smith meets full criteria if there were ever a historical figure that meets full criteria for the word charlatan once you understand Mormon church history Joseph Smith the poster child of of what it means to be a charlatan just factually just face value factually so for the renins to even dare use the word charlatan knowing that Joseph Smith is in the room is deeply problematic but that whole Litany of of sort of uh criticisms that they Levy about you know why would you entrust your spiritual welfare to someone who is spiritually bankrupt and that that you know ripped up what was planted in faith and blah blah blah a better metaphor would be who would you who would you trust a you know for advice on buying a car uh the corporation that built the shotty car the salesman that uh stands to profit from you buying a shotty car would you trust the salesman or the corporation or would you trust someone who actually bought the car and and watched it erupt in Flames as one of their children died you know in the car you know who would you trust the salesman in the corporation or the person that bought the car and saw it descend into um disarray and uh and disaster you would trust the consumer that had a bad experience that was willing to talk publicly about their bad experience it's the whole Foundation of Amazon and the kind of the Web 2.0 economy with reviews whe when you're buying a a commercial product on Amazon are you going to trust a product that's been rated with a 4.5 to Five Star average review with tens of thousands of people reviewing it um or you going to trust the product that's been given horrible reviews um you know and so I just think it's it's a really bad metaphor here yeah I mean it's just it it's it's a rough one it is and it's just it's one of those things where you go um to Nemo's point they do say a weekend hacker Roger Federer so it's not like they're saying that you can't trust someone else on tennis but when it comes to you know with the with the doctor you know a charlatan or a doctor it's like would you trust someone who made Revelations that failed or you know someone else and I just that's where I'm just like all roads have to lead to the church and they're making this example to basically tell these these kids you can't trust anyone else but the church because everyone else is a Charlton everyone else is out to get you and I just feel like it's it it sticks with people you know it really does have an impact and I think that's what makes it so to me just so unethical and just wrong but you know at least we're done with that talk for now all right yeah so that's a pretty heinous talk it's pretty harmful and um I I think uh hopefully the church someday will get rid of it and I think we probably need to cover it more because it's just so bad yeah all right um well I guess we're going to go on to a new talk with elder Corbridge is that right yeah this is basically a month I think a month apart and this one is you know the last was given to the youth so for younger kids this is actually been giving to college students and so um Elder Lawrence E Corbridge is going to give a devotional he gave a devotional to BYU students um in the exact same month and it was covered by the church news so we don't have the clips from it but the title of the church news article was what to do with your questions according to General to one General Authority who's an expert on anti-church materials and um you know this was written after n 's name changed cuz they didn't put anti- Mormon um this talk was basically the same thing but for a slightly older audience it was focused on keeping members from looking into the truth claims but Corbridge is going to use as we talked about our last episode appeals to authori as a way to redirect those questions and so he is um going to make this claim where he says there may not be anything out there of that nature meaning anti-mormon that I haven't read um and he says that as a way to assure them that there's nothing to fear because he's read it and he's come through it so why can't you and so then he talks about how reading all of this anti-church material um always left him with a sense of Gloom and it's again it's a signal being sent to members that when you read material about the church that talks about not being true it's going to make you feel crappy inside which is actually true you do you don't feel good about it and it's a way to tell them hey if you you don't want to read this stuff it's going to make you feel really down because Satan's going to get a hold of you and it's another way to try to control what you're what you're accessing and he's doing in a way by saying I've already looked at it I've come out the other side you don't need to bother with it and that plays into the Mormon idea of decision- making by feelings I.E if it's going to make you feel bad it therefore can't be true because we're taught to discern Truth by how it makes us feel so I read it it made me feel bad therefore it can't be true and I also want to say that it's very easy to be an expert on something which you define I.E he defines what is anti-church material and what isn't see of course he can say he's read all of it cuz he gets to Define what it is so it's hardly a bold claim to say that he's an expert on something that he gets to decide what is and isn't yeah yeah and and I would just add you know let's let's switch the metaphor now to like tobacco Executives who are you going to trust about uh tobacco being cancerous are you going to trust the tobacco Executives that stand a profit from people buying uh tobacco that are going to all testify in front of a Senate Judiciary hearing that in their interv viws tobacco doesn't cause cancer are you going to trust them are they the experts on whether tobacco causes cancer or is it going to be medical scientists who are external gatherers of data and in that sense a general Authority a Mormon General Authority is not just not the best expert on whether you know the Mormon church or the church's history Bears scrutiny it would be objective historians who weren't employees of the Church who would probably be the best experts or the best authorities on whether the Mormon church was credible on whether Joseph Smith was a charlatan or not it's going to be external historians that are the best Authority not the church's top leadership because the church's top leadership or even the church's paid historians have a conflict of interest and thus cannot be fully trusted just like scientists bought off by the Tobacco Company companies or Tobacco Company salespeople or executives are not going to be credible authorities about uh the health of tobacco yeah yeah and you want to say that you know oh that wouldn't happen they wouldn't let that bias creep in look at the last episode we did look at car Molin saying that he takes everything and puts into the Paradigm of the church is true yeah that's his first and foremost priority he's an academic and yet he'll make that statement boldly and publicly so it absolutely this bias absolutely does affect the trustworthiness of these men and their interpretation of the facts yep all right okay well let's go on to the next uh slide about this talk yeah and this is where I think this really gets kind of troubling and so this is basically uh kind of an excerpt from the church news article and I don't know if Nemo if you would like to read it just it kind of goes over how Corbridge is going to frame this talk okay from the church news now is a day where deception is everywhere and the spectrum of deception is Broad it ranges from attacks on the restoration Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon to those who claim to believe in the restoration but are disillusioned with doctrine that conflicts with shifting attitudes of the day Elder Corbridge explained there are primary and secondary questions when it comes to the church the primary questions must be answered first as they are most important they include is there a God who is our father is Jesus Christ the son of God the savior of the world was Joseph Smith a prophet is is the Church of Jesus Christ of latterday saints the kingdom of God on Earth in contrast the secondary questions are unending they include questions about church history polygamy blacks in the priesthood women in the priesthood how the book of Mor was translated DNA in the Book of Mormon gay marriage different accounts of the first vision and so on if your answer if you answer the primary questions the secondary questions get answered too or they pale into insignificance and you can deal with things you understand and things you don't understand things you agree with and things you don't agree with without jumping ship all together Elder Corbridge said H so what's wrong Nemo what are you what are you what are you grimacing about he gets to decide what the most important questions are those questions may not be the most important to the people that he's talking to uh he then puts all the other questions that uh people have into a secondary camp that he says aren't as important but actually those other questions that he puts into that secondary Camp very well may undermine the answer that he wishes people to have to the primary questions I is there a loving father well I look at the priest ofan and then may question how loving he is for example so these questions can't just be put off in some secondary box because they absolutely affect what he deems to be the primary questions and just to reiterate he doesn't really get to decide what the primary questions are because to everyone there are things that are more or less important about the church there are things that there that that we talk about what testimony is built on in the ls Church you know I like to think of the whole shelf analogy it seems to be that everyone's shelf is made of their most important thing and it's only when that they discover the truth of that then everything else goes because all the other stuff wasn't as important to them as that one thing whatever that may be yeah Mike just you know to point out and the way this talk is developed is really kind of clever from a perspective of someone that's trying to force Mormonism to be true but when you ask in your first two questions if there if God is you know if God is real and if Jesus Christ is the Son of God you're then saying well if you believe one and two then naturally you got to believe three and four which is about the Mormon church it's like no you know that's the thing I've been saying a lot the Mormon Church latches itself onto God there's no mention of the Mormon Church in the Bible there's no mention of you know these the separate civilization in the Bible or anything like that because it's you know a 19th century work of of of scripture and so the trying to tie the two together which also makes it tougher to leave because that's the whole thing if you leave you're going to leave God which is again not true and as as Nemo said you know what you're trying to do here is to get people to say well yeah yeah God's real yeah yeah Jesus lived well that means Joseph was a prophet that means the book of Mor's true which means everything else falls apart and you know to to kind of go back I think we may have touched on this earlier but it's like saying um you go to a realtor and you um have a home inspection and the home inspection tells you the wiring is faulty and the house could go up in Flames at any point the foundation has a lot of hidden cracks that that were not disclosed to you but the previous owner actually knew about and you go to the the realtor and you're like I don't want to buy this house there are this thing is not what it was going to be and they said walk with me you walk with them you look at the house they like is there a house in front of you and you're like yeah is there a door to go inside mhm can you can you go inside and be protected from from the weather yeah I guess so well therefore the house is good to move into it it's like no there's all these problems underneath and those problems underneath are what make up the house and so what they're trying to do here is to tell you not to worry about all the the foundation of the church because you know the church is there and I just feel like this is a very well-crafted argument to try to tie things that billions of people believe into to the you know 15 16 million members of the Church believe in order to try to circumvent all of those problems and it just it's really dishonest and it really is a disingenuous argument from Corbridge because he's trying to tie together things that that really don't naturally go together yeah yep and I'll just say in some ways it's a bait and switch to go you know the the the whole point you if you go back to the 1830s it's just all about how the church is restored the Church was in apostasy now this is the one true church we have the authority we have modern scripture The Book of Mormon the book of Abraham their translations what the church wants to do is say let's dmhas ize all that and it's do you believe in God do you believe in Jesus which are not distinctive LDS church beliefs you can be a just a generic non-denominational Christian and believe in God and Jesus um but they want to deemphasize that and they want to emphasize the ordinances Authority modern day leadership but they want to deemphasize now Joseph Smith and the historicity of the Book of Mormon in the book of Abraham but then again if he if he wants to say was Joseph Smith a prophet a legitimate question he's saying that is a legitimate question well that's what the LDS discussion series and that's what Mormon stories podcast in the CES letter and Nemo the Mormon you know YouTube channel that's what we're trying to explore and so again he's almost talking out of both sides of his mouth because if you want to decide if Joseph Smith was a prophet or not how do you figure that out you learn the factual history about them which the Mormon church is certainly not going to teach you so you go to a source like Mormon stories or like rough Stone Rolling or like uh no man knows my history or Nemo the Mormon or CES letter or Mormon think or letter for my wife or Mormonism live with radio free Mormon you get a more objective recounting of Joseph Smith and its history and only his history and only then can you decide whether or not Joseph Smith was a prophet or not so the you know is LDS discussions explore and Mormon stories and Nemo the Mormon are we exploring secondary questions when we dig deeper into the question of was Joseph Smith the prophet I'd say no I'd say we are bridge yes what according to all the core Bridge yes yeah but I don't think I I don't think that's right I don't think that's true I agree yeah I agree yeah all right so you made the point I was going to make John like the point I made before really strongly you know again these are his primary questions was Joseph Smith a prophet well several of the questions he listed secondary would help you determine that yes or no you need to look at the multiple accounts of the first vision and decide whether those undermined his claimed to be a prophet you need to look at the way the book of was translated and decide whether that undermines his claim DNA in the book of does that undermine his claim uh polygamy does that undermine his claim all of them they have the potential to undermine the answer to the question was Joseph Smith a prophet yeah so they need to be addressed yeah absolutely and and I will say oh sorry I me to the other thing that's kind of funny about is that within the Mormon Church they want you to decide on those primary questions before you even know what the secondary questions are and that's another problem with this talk which is when you're you're trying to get someone to join the church say me as a as a convert they don't go into any of the secondary questions so they get you to lock into the the the primary questions before you even know what the other ones are and I think that is um intentional but I think that's also why they really don't want members going there and so yeah that's just a short way of saying they know what they're doing when they when they when they as Nemo said when they make the rules of the game they know they know exactly what they want the outcome to be yeah all right let's go to the next slide yeah this is just you know when you really take what he's trying to do here and kind of apply it if I show you a car and I ask you to buy it the first thing you're going to want to do is you're going to look under the hood take it for a test drive you're going to have it inspected by an independent mechanic who is not connected to that dealership to verify it holds up to the claims that I'm making to you as the dealership and as the salesperson if I then tell you it looks great from the exterior and you should not need to worry about anything that actually makes the car run you would tell me I'm hiding something and you would never buy that car you'd walk away and the same is true here the church is telling you through these devotionals to in this case college students who were supposed to be thinking critically um that not only should you not look under the hood but that doing so is a character flaw on your part and to me what greater admission can you get from the Mormon church that they know their truth claims do not hold up than having multiple leaders telling the Youth of this church that they should not be researching it they know full well they do not have answ to these issues that can withstand any scrutiny so they want to make sure that you don't open the hood and take a look look inside in the first place and as Nemo said as you said John the secondary questions are what give you the primary answers if the secondary questions tell you that the church's truth claims are not true you cannot possibly believe the primary questions that Joseph Smith was a prophet that the Book of Mormon is an ancient and authentic record yep Nemo I'd say move straight to the next slide I think we've covered that all right let's do it um Elder Corbridge blames those who leave for focusing on the secondary problems yeah and so I just before we head off of this talk I want to highlight one more part of the devotional and he says there are some members of the church who don't know the answers to the primary questions and they spend their time and attention slogging through the secondary questions they mistakenly try to learn the truth by process of elimination by attempting to eliminate every doubt Elder Corbridge said one cannot prove the church is true by disproving every claim made against It ultimately there must be affirmative proof with the things of God the affirmative proof comes by Revelation through the spirit of the Holy Ghost and this is such a bad strawman argument that the church uses constantly to try to shut down conversation we do not need to eliminate every doubt but when the evidence is telling us that the church's truth claims are demonstrably false we can safely know that the primary questions cannot be true as well and so they're trying to tell you that you're so focused on proving proving something true that you can't possibly kind of take a step back and know the church is true but you know is a really easy example Joseph Smith declared that the lonit are the ancestors of the Native Americans DNA tells us that Native Americans came from Asia and not from Jerusalem if that's the case the Book of Mormon is not what Joseph Smith claimed it to be that means the primary question of is Joseph Smith a prophet cannot be yes because he's getting failed Revelations failed claims and so they know this but they're trying to make a stman argument to say that people don't want to answer the primary questions until they have every single thing sorted out in the secondary but the reality is that it's because people are finding out that the the secondary questions are false that they're having a hard time saying yes to the primary they know this but they're trying to spin it again so that these college students who are supposed to be getting all this information don't actually want to look absolutely Nemo it's it's a brilliant constructed strawman argument because they they make this implication sorry I'm just going to look at the slide again they make this implication that you know you're going to have to deal with everything and that's overwhelming so um just focus on the core issues but actually the core issues can be resolved quite simply um because like Mike said it's very simple that well if there are things if there's disconfirming evidence then that is enough to disprove something that is enough to to put something in the position of not being true um and that's much different to trying to play that whacka mole and and and Vanquish every single doubt because there's always going to be doubt and that's where they'll often then push apologist things will push into scientists don't know everything either science is just theories they're just the and genuine human inquiry into the truth doesn't require that we know everything but it requires that we pay attention to the evidence that presents itself to us and make conclusions based on that evidence as we have it and so ignoring evidence that disconfirms the church's truth claims isn't a positive and it can't be equivocated with a lack of understanding in scientific Fields absolutely y all right well we're this is clearly going to be a two-part episode but there's a few more slides I think we should show before we end this part one and then um allow people to digest what we've talked about today and then come back for the part two because there's so much here I think we should go to the next slide which is kind of unbelievable it's a it's a it's a talk given by Mormon first you know first presidency member D H Oaks where he basically makes the crazy assertion that research is not the answer to this problem yeah and what's even crazier to me is this is a month after the two devotionals we've covered so far so this is all in the exact same time window and D H Oaks is speaking in Chicago and he's asked um about a mixed Faith couple and how the believing members should address their now non-believing spouse and this is from uh the church news and I'm kind of shocked they actually wanted to publish this but it says I suggest that research is not the answer Oak said but the best answer to any question that threatens faith is to work to increase faith in the Lord Jesus Christ conversion to the Lord precedes conversion to the church and conversion to the Lord comes through prayer and study and service furthered by loving patient on the part of the spouse and other concerned family members and so Oaks is explicitly telling a member whose spouse has lost belief in the church due to researching the truth claims that research is not the answer but what is the answer is to not look at the Evans and instead turn back to the church that the spouse is doubting and to not think critically about the issue and this is just one of the most damning quotes and I've heard a lot of apologetics to it but in the what they're saying right here is if you're spouse the person you love the person you married finds out information about the church you should not engage with them and do the research with them you should only go back to whatever the church gives you and what a horrible statement not a fan how about you Nemo are you a fan not a fan because he's in in one fell swop demonizing the spouse by saying they've done something wrong they shouldn't have been researching and then cutting off the necessary and important communication between a husband and wife as it would be within the LDS church uh that is necessary for their relationship to flourish when one of them has questions they need to be able to communicate they need to be able to talk to one another and what he's creating is a situation whereby one spouse becomes isolated because the other one has been told not to deal with it not to address it and that what they did was wrong they shouldn't have been researching they the the spouse themselves that is dealing with this then shouldn't research themselves either so they're in a position of of siloing their spouse and it's it's horrific it's going to create all sorts of problems within marriages yeah absolutely and and again I'm just going to refer back to Stephen hasson's bite model Cults try and keep you from learning information that's the eye in the bite model so that you won't have thoughts like maybe this church isn't true or is harmful to me and there can't be I cannot imagine a bigger red flag than the number two person in the entire church telling its members that research is not the answer and and by the way this feels like an anti-mormon quote to me because my favorite hymn growing up in the church was the hymn oh say what is Truth uh you know oh say what is truth is the fairest gem that the riches of world can't produce and Priceless the value of truth will be when the proud monarchs costliest diadem is counted but draw and refuse the whole point of that him is that truth is the most important thing that's the Mormonism that I grew up with I was I grew up with the Mormonism that said do what is right let the consequence follow right um and so to have a a Mormon Apostle saying that research is not the answer the truth is not the answer that actually feels anti-mormon to me am I am I Nemo as someone who was also raised in the church do you agree I agree the church was the whole idea that we have the truth we have the fullness of the restored gospel and so yeah the idea that again it comes back to Joseph Smith was a boy looking for the truth and we're just not allowed to emulate his example we're not allowed to emulate the example of the man that we're taught to Revere for being brave enough to ask the question it's bizarre and it's antithetical to everything I was taught to value I was taught to Value the truth above all else I really like the second do what is right let the consequence follow uh I firmly believe in that and we see time and time again from our leaders that that rule doesn't necessarily apply to them yeah yeah I'll just throw out there real quick the I mentioned it earlier this shows that the church knows that their truth claims do not hold up to scrutiny I mean this is D Oaks the guy who's going to be the next Prophet assuming he out lives Russell Nelson telling members not to research the claims that you're supposed to dedicate your life to um so is it anti- Mormon I mean kind of I mean I know they used to say if we have the truth it cannot be harmed if we have not the truth it ought be harmed um but at the same time it to me D Oaks is a lawyer he knows exactly what he's doing and this is a leader who has a very good grasp of the fact that researching truth claims of the Mormon church is going to lead people out and D Oaks is a coward he's a coward to tell members not to research what he's selling them and I know that might off is very uh antagonistic towards the church but he D Oaks would never go even with some idiot like me into a public conversation because this quote tells you right away he knows full well that on the merits by the evidence this church isn't true and it will never ever live up to the truth claims through the evidence so he's telling you now to look you say that but he engaged with this idiot and um meaning Nemo you mean Nemo myself for the for the for the people listening um he engaged with me over questions of what is true and what is not true and his answer was appalling but people should go watch that episode but I'm saying he would never he would never talk with you in a public forum where other people could see it because he knows he' be destroyed by the evidence and that's what I always say like people always go oh uh debate me and I'm like I will talk to any person who has the authority to speak for the church in any public forum anytime anywhere because I have no doubt that if we were to have an act a debate but just a conversation um that they they would never be able to to live up to it because they know they know I mean this tells you the church knows their truth claims so hold up it let's put it let's just back up a second and I'm I'm in a church that I believe I believe the truth claims of the Mormon church and someone comes up to me and they said hey um my husband is telling me that this church isn't true I'd be like send him my way we're going to talk to him because I got the answers and instead they're like yeah just just leave them leave them triage you know it's just it's ridiculous they act like someone with doubts is someone that's got some contagious disease and the reality it's because he knows they don't have answers and this guy is an ordained prophets here in Revelator and instead of telling people well just send them my way I can give him the the resources he needs he's saying no no no don't don't even engage with them it's it's the biggest admission you'll ever get they don't trust their own claims yeah and so let's go to that next slide uh maybe to just kind of summarize yeah yeah this will b a good fine point on yeah this is terrible advice it's designed to stop the doubts of the non-believing spouse and um from spreading in the family because they're treating it like an illness but this is again what you'd expect from an organization that is looking out for its own interest before yours if you told a friend and I've done this so I know that this is how it ended for me anyways if you told a friend that you have doubts about the church and you devoted your whole life to it and one of the leaders of your church told you that I suggest that research is not the answer that friend would start to think you were either in a a very unhealthy church or even a cult the apologetic spin is that Oaks is trying to find a healthier way for this mixed Faith couple but the reality is that he's privileging the church over their marriage and as neemo mentioned earlier he's making it a lot harder for that mixed Faith couple to communicate because now he's putting that bigger wedge in them not only do they have problems with the the claims of the church but he's basically putting a a brick wall in between them by telling the believing spouse not to even listen this is not about strengthening their marriage it is about keeping the believing spouse from being exposed to the information that the spouse who left encountered because d folks knows full well that research will ultimately ultimately lead many members out of the church so if you ever have somebody in any area of your life not just religion that tells you research is not the answer to claims that you have to devote a lot of time money or to anything else to you turn you run and you never look back yeah again just to put a fine point on it imagine a a a corporation that selling a car and they say don't don't research whether the car is good or or or a pharmaceutical company that that says take our drugs buy our drugs use our drugs but don't investigate whether or not the drugs are healthy for you you you would know for sure that that that company uh was a fraud or if the government said hey we're we're deciding to go to war with this country they've done some really horrible things so we're going to attack them but do not research whether whether or not uh our claims are true about you know our reasons for war that would be an an immediate non-starter and here we are having having the number two person in the whole entire Mormon church literally telling people not to investigate it and you should run all right so let's do one last video before we uh go ahead and end today's episode do you want to set this up Mike yeah and first I'm gonna just piggyback off your last comment just again picture you going to a car dealership I'm just going to throw a Honda this time cuz I think I used a different brand last time you go up to the the the car salesperson and they're like this is the the greatest car it's going to be perfect for your family super safe all of stuff and and you pull out your phone you're like I've actually been looking at some of the different car sites they're saying that there's some safety issues they're saying there's a lot of recall problems reliability issues if that salesperson says I would put the phone away I suggest researching this is not going to give you the answer you're looking for you are walking out of that dealership every single time and and that is perfectly applicable to what d Oaks did here and the fact that we have members of the church applauding that and not walking away honestly blows my mind with that said we can go to the last slide I'm sorry I just wanted to get that out no problem all right let's do this last slide so this is another youth face to face this one is now from September 2019 so we're still in the same year and this is done by um Elder Christensen Elder Suarez and they're answering pre-selected questions from the youth because again as we've talked about these are they make them sound like they're getting questions on the fly but they're always ready they know exactly what's coming um and in one exchange Elder Christensen is going to say that doubts are dangerous uh which again I think is a horrible thing to say to the youth because as we talked about doubts can be a great thing to really get you to the the answers you need and um I just want to note that the theme in these talks continues to imply or in this case outright declare that doubts are dangerous to members and the only entity that doubts are dangerous to is the one that is holding those doubts over your head and benefiting from your loyalty which is the church and so as you watch this clip just think about who this question really benefit does it benefit the kids who are answering it or or or are hearing it or does it benefit the church that's giving it yeah all right let's roll roll the clip doubts about things we already know are very dangerous therefore whenever I'm giving advice to a friend who has questions and doubts I tried to take him back to the foundation of his own testimony if he were a return missionary I'm going to go back to the mission and ask him about his teachings to other people and how he felt about reading the book of Mormon and asked of God and I will try to recind in him the true feelings of the spirit therefore doubts are dangerous the questions is how we receive we receive Revelation the same for all of us we are always in the process of learning and as I read the scriptures I have many questions but I have no doubts because I know the things that I already know and I'm trying to expand my testimony deepen my feelings and listen to the spirit I heard some audible gasps do you want to go first uh Mike yeah it just you know it's one of those things that we we've talked about this in our last episode on Witnesses this is you know um your spouse finds out that you're cheating on them and instead of saying I did that and it was a mistake you say listen baby I still love you I need you to think about our the way you felt when we were getting married that's what you need to focus on you don't need to focus on what you've learned since you need to focus on those feelings you used to have before you knew all the information about our marriage and it's the same thing with the car example you know you could say if you go to the dealership after you buy a car and you find out they lied to you and the car is like remember that new car SM remember how awesome that was I need you to focus on that right now and not focus about the fact that I lied to you about um the history of the car and to call doubts dangerous after he's saying that what he does to people that have doubts is to try to take them back it's almost like when your computer has a a bad virus or um you install a program that screws everything up and on Windows anyways I don't know about uh about Mac they have they call restore points and so what you do is you you basically push your computer back to the previous restore point because that's back before everything got screwed up and the church is trying to do that they're saying okay we're just going to erase all the things you learn and just try to bring you back before you learn them to get those feelings it's just such a manipulative practice because it's not even answering the problems we're encountering whether you know as we said all these different problems polygamy book Abraham um First Vision whatever they're just basically saying just think of how you used to feel and the doubts will go away and if they don't that's dangerous to you and again as I said the doubts are only dangerous to the people that are holding something over you um you know to to go back to our earlier uh episodes as I've said treasure digging and Mormonism go hand inand because the church has constantly telling you to dig by paying tithing by volunteering to clean the church by volunteering uh to go to the temple and all these things and they promise you these Eternal rewards they never have to give you so you walking away is going to take something away from them it's not going to take anything away from you and so the these talks of saying doubts are dangerous really benefit the person that's holding those Eternal promises is over your head um and you could see that by the way they choose these words and the way they choose to do this to um audiences that are comprised of of of young kids and college students who are supposed to be um encouraged to think critically and to really figure out what is true and what is not true Nemo just looking for the lyrics to the him if you could hide to Cola because I believe the lyric is uh the to that LDS hymn Improvement and progression a one Eternal round is that the the lyric either way there is an idea within the LDS church that Improvement and progression are Eternal they are good they are valuable and how on Earth are people meant to improve and progress if they're not allowed to move forward by addressing doubts but instead must just continue to look backwards to the point at which the doubt didn't exist it's just antithetical to the entire Mormon ideal that we will continue to improve and progress in the eternities in in grow in knowledge in intellect in spiritual maturity and all these things they can't happen if you're constantly being told to Look Backwards to an earlier point because of some inconvenient truths that have now come to light yeah I would say it's again I'll just I'll just end as I've I've said multiple times this teaching of avoiding doubts of avoiding questions of avoiding research it's not just a a sure sign of a cult like the definition of a cult of cult Behavior it's also at its core anti- Mormon and totally against everything that I I was raised to believe that Mormonism stood for all right so this is just part one of a two-part uh episode on how the Mormon Church handles doubts um Mike do you want to give us a preview of of what what the next uh part two is going to be about yeah actually I think the next part is actually better than this part in the sense of we get to hear from Russell Nelson he gave a talk on doubts in 2021 um that I know a lot of you will be familiar with that we're going to talk about some of the ways he uh frames doubts and and what you should do with doubts and how to um avoid people with doubts and then we're going to have a very very recent talk from the current church historian on doubts which has at least two there's more but there's two quotes within his talk that are to me just mindblowing that in 2023 the church story and is going to say two different things that I think are just absolutely crazy um so I think it's going to be a good talk but it's going to be a lot more of looking at how the church frames doubts and how they speak to members about those doubts and and and obviously if you're watching this and and you're getting through these it's up to you to do with it what you want I personally as we've said feel like this is not um the Hallmark of a of a organization that's healthy and honest but um you know we're just like I said we're here to put it out there and people are going to do with it what they want but I I think the next one's going to be a good one all right Nemo any final thoughts anything you want to share sorry my unmute button is getting a bit sticky that it doesn't seem to want to work okay um so yeah I I think that to be honest Mike summed that up really nicely in that these these are not the Hallmarks of a healthy honest community and I want to Echo what John said that this is not the church I was brought up in these are not the values and ideals I was brought up with this is not what I understood it was to be a Mormon was to bury your head in the sand and not come to terms with things and to not confront things the whole appeal the whole USP of Mormonism is that we have answers to the difficult questions we have answers to the problems that other churches don't seem to have answers to um but now it seems that that intellectual curiosity is being stifled in the youth and instead they're just to um bury their heads in the sand and and go back to remembering primary songs you know what I believe it or this is going to sound bold but I think even Joseph Smith himself would violently reject this idea that you shouldn't research and and you shouldn't investigate and you shouldn't doubt don't you think Jose Smith the best books I believe is doctrine of covenants Joseph Smith was always an advocate for I believe he said something like take all the wisdom of learning from everywhere and bring it all in it was essentially his his motto yes but I would argue that Joseph Smith would only say that when he has control of the information because let's just say for example the navo expit were to come out and speak bad of him Joseph Smith was not a fan of people reading that so I think this is the same thing you see with church Joseph Smith I think would give these big flowery sermons about yeah seeki the best knowledge out of books you know let's listen to the you know to the the knowledge of the world but at the same time he's going to do the same thing we're doing today which is anytime someone says that knowledge those best books you're talking about are telling us what you're giving us is not true he would then call you a heretic and run you out of town so I I do think that Joseph Smith was a a much better charismatic leader as far as giving these kinds of um directions or at least these feelings that that may maybe information was more welcome but as we know every time someone spoke out against Joseph Smith they were destroyed publicly I mean um the happiness letter episode you referenced earlier when Nancy rigon came out and and leak the letter that Joseph did I mean the church newspapers were were writing articles about her being a horor so I I just feel like yeah Joseph Smith probably would have had more of a spirit of openness but only until let's just say Google came out and made it easy to figure out what he's doing so I I feel like we might be giving Joseph too much credit because he clearly was not open to information that that went against him hey if I want to take Joseph Smith at face value I'll take Joseph Smith at face value yeah Mike you know what Nemo I think it's a good time to break because you and I are about to have a Throwdown all right well Nemo uh please everybody please check out Nemo the Mormon his YouTube channel subscribe to it also please while you're here if you're on YouTube subscribe to our YouTube channel here also please subscribe on Facebook we love your Super Chat donations if you're joining us on a live stream we also really appreciate your donations uh to Mormon stories and the Oba stories Foundation you can go to Mormon stories.org click on the Donate button become a monthly subscriber you can also subscribe to Nemo's uh Channel by going to donorbox .org what Nemo the Mormon is that right yep that's the one you can donate and support Nemo's work there as well but then the best thing you can do is also just share these episodes share this these podcast links or this playlist link with everyone who you think wants to learn about the truth of the about the Mormon church so that they can make informed decisions uh Mike thanks so much for all you do we'll see you back next time yeah see you guys soon thanks again Nemo all the best and thanks everyone for us today our Mor my stories be good to each other be kind to each other we see you all again uh very soon uh take care everybody