Mormon Prophet Russell M. Nelson's Teachings on Doubts
Original Air Date: 2023-09-15
This detailed summary covers the content of the Mormon Stories Podcast episode titled "Mormon Prophet, Russell M. Nelson's Teachings on Doubts," featuring host John Dehlin and guests Mike (from LDS Discussions) and Nemo the Mormon. The discussion analyzes specific addresses given by LDS Church President Russell M. Nelson and Church Historian Kyle McKay regarding how members should navigate doubt and historical inquiries.
Part 1: President Russell M. Nelson’s Teachings on Doubt
The first half of the discussion focuses on a 2021 General Conference talk by President Nelson, where he outlines how members should handle wavering faith. The panel critiques several specific arguments made by the prophet:
4. The Appeal to Martyrdom (Sunk Cost Fallacy)Nelson asks whether Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith would have died for the church if they didn't know it was true, and references the 2,000 pioneers who died on the trail 11.
5. The Rain Story (Unfalsifiable Logic)Nelson recounts visiting the Pacific Islands where prayers stopped the rain in Fiji and Samoa, but not in Tahiti 15. He states that it takes faith to stop the rain, but also faith to persevere when the rain does not stop 16. The panel describes this as "heads I win, tails you lose" theology; whether the prayer is answered or not, the church claims it as a victory for faith, rendering the concept of prayer's efficacy meaningless 16, 17.
Part 2: Church Historian Kyle McKay’s Address
The second half of the episode analyzes a 2023 address by Church Historian Kyle McKay to students at BYU-Idaho. The panel finds this talk particularly revealing because McKay, a lawyer by trade, admits to the validity of doubts while simultaneously discouraging the search for answers.
4. Don't Scrutinize LeadersMcKay discourages studying the "errors of man" (referring to church leaders) to find the truths of God 30.
Summary of Key Themes and Conclusions
Analogy to solidify understanding:
The panel concludes that the church's approach to doubt is akin to a magician performing a trick. A magician relies on perspective; if the audience could see the trick from the magician's angle (the raw historical facts), the illusion (the church's truth claims) would vanish. Therefore, leaders like Nelson and McKay must tell the audience not to move, not to look behind the curtain, and not to listen to anyone who explains how the trick works 38.
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hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon stories podcast LDS discussions Edition I am John delin your host for today it is May 17 2023 and today we are in the uh towards the end of an epic series on Mormon stories called LDS discussions for those of you who don't know we are now currently on uh episode 45 uh where we are discussing as neutrally and as objectively as we can Mormon church truth claims uh today the topic is Mormon prophet Russell M Nelson's teachings on doubts we're in a sub-series within LDS discussions about how the church handles doubts uh for those of you who don't know this is all based on the amazing work of Mike from ldsdiscussions.com this series Builds on itself we're 45 episodes in if you haven't watched the previous 44 episodes please pause go back to the beginning watch them all because these episodes build on each other and um and of course I'll just say like I always say you can consume this series in isolation either on Spotify under the LDS discussions brand in audio or video or on the Apple podcast app or you can go to the Mormon stories podcast playlist and there's an LDS discussions playlist there where you can view these episodes sequentially we are joined today by two of my good friends who are both dead inside we have uh Mike from LDS discussions and I just want to note you both sort of humbly nodded when I said dead inside it's a little bit disturbing but we're gonna Just Go With It uh welcome Mike hey everybody it's good to be back and of course we have Nemo the Mormon from the Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel hey Nemo hello why is it you why is it you two are both okay acknowledging that you're dead inside what is wrong with you I'm British I don't know what Mike's problem is yeah I don't know my problem is either it just it is what it is right I'm I just for the record I'm not dead inside I just and I and I have 73 uh British DNA yeah he does yeah so I guess my my dead inside jeans are dormant oh yeah because I've got 95 so somewhere I'm still I'm still three quarters bro somewhere in that like 12 23 you know whatever it is anyway um we we covered last episode part one of how the Mormon Church handles doubt we shared a lot of cool videos or disturbing videos depending on your point of view and we decided to split this episode into two because this part two number one was going really long and then number two uh a lot of this episode really focused on uh beloved Mormon prophet Russell and Nelson and how he handles doubts so make sure you watch the last episode because this episode Builds on last episode and without any further Ado Nemo well let's say Nemo first do you have any announcements you want to make Nemo before we begin uh I mean I've done a video on this talk that we're about to look at so check it out what's it what's it called uh lazy Learners and LAX disciples is what you type into YouTube and you'll find my video we can pop a link down there I'm sure okay but I sat through the entire talk so you don't have to and I went through it Blow by blow so okay yeah and while you're at it please uh subscribe to the name of the Mormon Channel and also uh subscribe to his donor box at um donorbox.org Nema the Mormon right Nemo yeah you could do that if you want all right okay Mike any other any announcements you want to make before we dive in no I think this episode to your point if you haven't seen the first one I'd watch that first because the first episode kind of covers how some of the more recent Talks by church leaders have gone especially when you're talking to young kids to college students and then this one is gonna we're gonna cover Russell Nelson's talk um on doubts we're also going to cover a very recent talk by the church historian on Dallas which happened just within the last month and so those two top I think are really important both because one's coming from the prophet of the church who's the current prophet and then the other one's coming from the current church historian who obviously should have access or does have access to weigh inform way more information about church history than we do so to hear how he phrases doubts to hear how he phrases how to deal with um learning things about the church that kind of tell you that it's not what it claims to be is really eye-opening and I think that it shows how um the game has changed so to speak for how the church has to handle doubts now given that we all have access to so much information okay and for those of you who aren't Mormon or have never been Mormon Russell Nelson is the current president and prophet of the Mormon Church uh we are taught that he is God's literal mouthpiece on the earth for the entire world uh and that he is a special witness of Christ is probably talked to God and or Jesus that's kind of Mormon General Mormon belief is that overstating it not really I mean it's been we've we did uh we've done episodes on Revelation so we've talked about this but Russell Nelson will constantly say things like I was woken in the middle of the night with an impression that I wrote down and the implication to members is that those impressions are Revelations he's getting in his sleep um his wife Wendy Nelson I think in an interview said something like he pulls out his yellow pad tells Wendy basically get out of the room it's happening and then she leaves the room and he writes down the whatever he had in his dream uh you know it's it's not much different than when um you'll hear comedians for example say that they sleep with a pad next to their bed because sometimes they'll wake up with something that's funny and they want to write it down so they don't forget it um it doesn't mean that that joke's coming from God so we'll go through that but yeah I would say they are the the Mormon church today does a really good job of not saying explicitly that they meet with Jesus or with God because they'll have talks where they'll say I know his face but then they'll also have talks where they say you're not gonna actually see them so you know but they also do that game where saying the word impression is basically saying I got a revelation that maybe isn't in words but just more in a feeling and therefore we're going to do something like say um say that God's offended when you use the word Mormon after we spent tens of millions of dollars to promote it um that happened from uh Russell Nelson's impression so in the church we consider that a revelation even though there's no actual Revelation behind it that happened from Russell M Nelson's Grudge with Gordon B Hinckley I think yeah that wasn't that wasn't a spontaneous thing that had been brewing for a long time which is why it's all the more interesting when Wendy Nelson talks about him being Unleashed because it was an idea he'd held on to for so long yep he still can't I think he called it an impression like I think he said it was impressed upon my mind the importance of the full name of the church or the correct name of his church and that's his code word for saying treat this as a revelation even though there's no actually because if something's impressed upon the mind of the Prophet then it's a it's a revelation sorry John but the point I don't want to get lost is that it's absolutely the the beginning value proposition that a Mormon missionary will teach you in the very first within 20 minutes of the very first discussion that you'll have they will say God speaks to prophets today that is what the restoration of Mormonism is all about God spoke to Joseph Smith in 1820 and he speaks to a modern Prophet today and they'll show you a picture of Russell M Nelson and say this dude speaks with God in a way that none of none of the rest of us do and is a Mormon growing up I knew that the prophet spoke with God and not just not just the prophet but also the first presidency of the Quorum of The Twelve all 15 of those dudes are special Witnesses of Jesus Christ I'm saying that in air quotes and that means they talk to Jesus and and the church may try and use subtle language these days for plausible deniability reasons but they also want to make sure everyone behind closed doors continues to believe that they're special Witnesses of Jesus and so I'm trumping all of you if you're going to try and soften that because I think that's factual Nemo is showing it's all in here in the preach preach my gospel which is the missionary manual okay Mike should we go to the first slide yeah let's start up all right let's do it and so this is a talk from General Conference in 2021 so obviously this is an important talk and um Russell Nelson outlines uh basically how to increase faith in God and more importantly as we've talked about when they say God they mean the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints um but in doing so he is going to constantly paint those with doubts in the worst possible light and so we're going to highlight a few of the comments that from his talk that show um how they're connected to the previous talks we mentioned in the last episode because he's trying to send a very clear message to members um because we are in this particular case saying I am the one who speaks for God and this is what we need to think about when we think about people with doubts or if you have doubts and so um as Nelson as you watch this video he's going to tell members that now is the time to increase Faith he's going to take a shot not just at those who have left but those who are wavering by calling them lazy Learners which is a phrase if you've been out of the church well I'm sure you've heard because this caused a lot of people to be upset because the the real and we'll get into this after the comment but the idea that people who leave are lazy Learners is one that the church wants people to feel because it really is a way to dismiss the real the real reasons that people leave and obviously it could not be further from the truth it poisons the well against those that have left and it's ironic that he has said this and then in his most recent general conference talk said that we need to be kind in our interactions with others and that we need to not be contentious we need to be peacemakers uh we shouldn't malign he particularly used the word malign people that disagree with us but to be fair to be fair it's okay for him right just to play Devil's Advocate it's okay for him to say let's have peace going forward um I guess he'll be under much more scrutiny if he says anything like this again yeah he can say it it should just come with an acknowledgment that even he has said things in the past that may have upset people and you know moving forward we should all try to be a bit Kinder like I have no problem with the overall sentiment it's just the kind of slight hypocrisy of it coming from an Unapologetic man yeah I agree he missed an opportunity for sure so Mike should we play that clip yeah let's play that clip all right let's play the first clip lazy Learners and LAX disciples will always struggle to muster even a particle of faith I mean I'm already super offended it's absurd that is one of the most offensive things said in the modern era for people who are questioning their faith yeah I mean it just it just misses everything that people that go through go ahead no I'll say you can finish it no I think I finished it that's all that was on that yes I thought so no I should say it's it it's attempting to diminish what people who leave the church go through and um you know one of the things that I've learned by running the website and and talking to people is that most people who leave leave because of the fact that they actually are doing a lot more research than they used to do as a member and so this idea is really as Nemo said it's directly to Poison the Well it's an untrue statement um it's a dishonest approach for someone who is a self-proclaimed proclaimed Prophet to take because as we've talked about in previous episodes the Mormon church does a ton of research they do focus groups they do surveys they do surveys all the time with members they know why people are leaving they know why people are what they're encountering what issues are having so this idea that the church is going to come out in this talk and say they're lazy Learners goes against what they know like they know when they say that that it's not a factually true statement but they also know that the um the need of that talk is to get members who are listening to him to want to shut off anyone who is coming to them with information they found and so you know just to say Quant to try to quantify all the time I spent reading material listening to podcasts over the last few years it's just crazy to say that that's lazy um and again it's just it's one of those things that we talked about from our last episode if you watched our last episode we did um the Redlands youth devotional in in the Redlands use devotional he said at last blind like the mole in his burrow he usually substitutes ridicule for reason indolence for labor and becomes a lazy scholar and so this is building off of earlier talks and so when the church tries to kind of say oh it's just one opinion of man you could kind of see that there's themes in these talks that are going and this um the Redlands talk was I believe 2019 and then two years later it goes from you know lazy scholar to Lazy learner and so you can kind of see that it's not an accident that these words are being used and I think actually lacks disciples is is often overlooked in that sort of little couplet because that's a recipe for scrupulosity problems the idea that if you're struggling or if you have questions or if things you've learned about the church are causing you discomfort then you need to work harder you're you're not being a faithful or hardworking enough disciple you need to just pick yourself up by your bootstraps and work harder and then it'll all be fine and that's sort of not great rhetoric yeah really quickly I want to share with everyone a resource that I think is crucial and Mike we probably should add this to our fall LDS discussions list um and I've referenced this on Mormon stories a few times uh back in the early 2000 2010s uh I was I was uh contacted by a dear friend named Travis Stratford who was connected with an area Authority Hans Matson from Sweden and long story short Marlon Jensen Marlon k j Jensen was the church historian of the time and a general Authority and because of all the people having doubts and because of uh Hans Matson particularly terrifying the church as as a prominent European area Authority started having doubts we work together to put together um a study called why do people leave the LDS church I'm going to put a link up in the show notes that that shows this study but basically um it it has a a really really fascinating report that was ultimately submitted to um Dieter uchdorf that uh came about from thousands and thousands of people that we uh that we surveyed and basically all I want to say about that is you need to check it out but one of the main findings of that survey was that the the people losing their faith on the internet these days have a higher than average education a higher than average income and a higher than average representation in high level callings like Bishop bishopric ap's on missions Relief Society presidents Ward and stake young women's and young men's presidents Etc and this this study was so compelling and disturbing to Marlon k j Jensen that he literally was quoted as saying that the church is losing its best in its brightest and that uh completely contradicts this lazy learner's narrative that Russell M Nelson is uh is advancing and and I and and that's all I need to say and I'm not even saying that he knows he's being disingenuous here it's very possible that he just either doesn't know about this study because was afraid to tell him or he doesn't believe it or um you know just as is uh persuaded by his own biases but but top people at Church Headquarters know that this narrative isn't true whether or not Nelson buys into it any any quick comments either of you want to make about that no no just point I would just point out the LAX is Nemo point out that the Lexus disciples comment um is kind of gonna lead to some scrup velocity because you're going to have especially when you have like um younger members um who are struggling and they're like okay what am I doing wrong and it really is a way to reverse blame it's like if you're finding faults with the church if you're having doubts it's because you're not a strong enough disciple and that's sometimes a very effective tool to getting people to then blame themselves at the same time it as Nemo said it comes at a cost because you know we've you've had episodes before with um people that have um religious uh scrupulosity and it could cause problems so it it's a um it's uh a dangerous uh tool for a prophet or a leader of an organization be using um to try to signal to their members that if you start having doubts it's because you're not doing enough it's also just insulting and they know better by now they know better and um okay let's go to the next slide all right so this next clip from the talk is one that generated I would say the most discussion because this is where he's just gonna try to kind of almost twist a knife on those who have doubts and I just want to point out as you watch this these are tactics at high demand religions and Cults use to keep members from associating uh with anyone on the outside who will speak out against the truth claims of the leaders and as we mentioned in our last you know couple of talks that we've done from last episode if any other religious organization or church or politician answered your doubts in the way that Russell Nelson is going to do it here would you stick around for another minute or would you say I've seen what I need to see I'm done and so as you watch this clip just kind of try to picture it especially if you're a believing member picture the hearing this clip from someone from the Catholic church or someone from um you know I don't want to say a cult but you know David koresh or the reorganized uh Church you know Latter-Day Saints um the Church of Christ and just picture like what would you say if you were coming to church with a friend to another religion and you heard this what would your first reaction be all right let's uh let's play the clip if you have doubts about God the father and his beloved Son or the validity of the restoration or the veracity of Joseph Smith's Divine calling as a prophet choose to believe and stay faithful take your questions to the Lord and to other faithful sources study with a desire to believe rather than with the hope that you can find a flaw in the fabric of a prophet's life or a discrepancy in the scriptures stop increasing your doubts by rehearsing them with other doubters all right let's ask Nemo for his his uh cold reaction to that and then Mike will have you jump in it's this idea of just choose to believe this is that simple I'm off back to church guys I mean I got to church anyway but you know that's it I'm done I've closed down my channel because I just I'll just choose to believe that's fine it's it's nonsense it's it's absolute nonsense to say that someone with with reasonable doubts compelling reasons to doubt as the church historian will go on to say if people with compelling reasons to doubt are told to just choose to believe I think that speaks to a lack of answers possibly on the side of the person saying it because he should be able to give compelling reasons to believe he shouldn't just ask people to choose it without any sort of backing up of that does that make sense yeah Mike what do you want to add well um the next few slides kind of go through what I'm saying but yeah it's it's this idea that we have Dallin Oaks in 2019 saying research is not the answer and now you've got Russell Nelson just saying choose to believe like no one in the top leadership of the church is saying if you've got questions come to your leaders and we have answers this is not you know this is the church is true and we can show you why these questions you're having are not based in in history they're not based in evidence but instead they're just saying dude don't don't talk to other people who are having problems don't talk to other people who have found issues just stick with us and that is a really it shows a lack of Confidence from Russell Nelson that he believes that the claims that the church has are true and it's also one that is a very uh controlling and manipulative thing to do um with people that Revere you as a prophet of God yeah and I don't know how much of it is cynical manipulation versus just cluelessness because he is 90 whatever but um yeah but but I don't for all my attempts at not over inflating my position in the world I do think I have spoken to more question Mormon questioners and doubters than almost anyone in the world definitely tens of thousands at this point and I can say that almost unanimously these people if they had a fault it was caring too much not too little they weren't lazy they weren't just trying to rehearse doubts they had sincere problems that were legitimate and um and and Nelson's characterization of them is very glib the easiest thing in the world within Mormonism is just to keep believing the hard thing the challenging thing what I call the courageous thing is to be willing to even start to doubt and question because the social and the familiar real consequences are are so often so incredibly dire uh and so he just they just this is almost an unpardonable sin that in 2020 what year did he give this talk do you guys know twenty one yeah the by 2021 they're they're still advancing this narrative at the highest of levels it's it's it's egregious dereliction of responsibility and I I couldn't emphasize that enough okay let's go on to the next slide yeah um uh one back one more back one more okay yeah and so just you know as I said when you know when I said to imagine that you're with someone else and you're at church for another religion and so I'm using Scientology because that's obviously I think that would qualify more as a definitely a high demand religion probably I think to a lot of people occult and so you're sitting there with your friend you hear the leader of their church say if you have doubts about scientology choose to believe and stay faithful take your question questions directly to our leader David miskovich I think Miss cavage I don't know how you say it and read our faithful approved sources study with a desire to believe rather than with the hope that you can find a flaw in the fabric of elrond Hubbard or history stop increasing your doubts by rehearsing them with other doubters would you respond by saying yeah that sounds pretty reasonable or would you reply to your friend with you need to get out of here and never look back and I think we all know what the answer is and this really comes down to as we talked a few episodes ago about special pleading if you remove the special plating and say I need this to be true and you look at this just from that lens of like how would I view this from another place you would immediately see this is not a healthy thing that's being done I just want to I want to make sure we can't be accused of making false binaries here there is a spectrum of responses within that but I think most people would tend towards the end of that doesn't sound reasonable because yeah just because I don't want that false binary to be no that's a good point anymore I'm glad you said it just because yeah I don't want this to be like one of those things where like it's not black and white it's not but I'm just saying like would you find that to be something that would feel like an honest fulfilling answer or would you kind of go that there's something off there and I I really think that if you took a focus group of 100 people and you had made sure that that focus group believed it was another religion saying it I really believe I I mean I would bet money that over 90 close to 100 would say they're that that's not that's not a good place yeah no I think I think we were on it if we're honest with ourselves we all know that we buy us our own in-group and we we all give special consideration to our own in-group that we wouldn't give to other groups um and I would invite people to kind of yeah reflect on that all right let's go to the next slide yeah and so now I just want to take this one step further and apply to something that's not a religious situation and so we've used the car example a bit but suppose you just bought a car it's having issues and so you look online to see if you could kind of find answers to fix it and you found out that the dealership not only misrepresented the history of the car when you bought it but you discovered they have defrauded others in the past as well with questionable sales maybe they don't tell them that there was flood damage or previous accidents so you go to the dealership and the sales person looks at you and they say if you think this car is not as good as when you bought it choose to believe and stay faithful that it will get you where you need to go take your questions directly to our service center and read our faithful approved reviews from Happy customers read these reviews with the desire to believe what we're telling you rather than the hope that you can find a flaw in our sales tactics stop increasing your doubts by rehearsing them with other upset customers and I realize this sounds super facetious but the problem is when you look at it this way you would realize that you'd probably be walking out of that car dealership ready to call a lawyer because clearly this line thinking is designed to shut off your critical thinking and that is what Russell Nelson is doing and so with a car example yeah you're probably going this is ridiculous but the point is that line of thinking is designed with a very specific intent to Poison the Well and to keep you from looking deeper and that is not what any religion that believes their claims should be doing yeah because if you believe your claims boldly this is what I always found strange about leaves the church that they they never get involved in debates they'll never you know go Toe to Toe with someone who disagrees with them um because it almost seems as though they're not actually that convinced out of a safe controlled environment of their own beliefs which if they were would leave to the lead to the sort of behaviors where they are willing and able to have their beliefs uh not attacked but questioned and they would have answers to those questions but they very much exist in a bubble of don't question us just believe us yeah and that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence really to my into my mind all right let's go to the next slide and this is one of the parts you know we um talk about where Nelson sorry Russell Nelson is trying to reframe the idea of Faith to make it basically transcend actual evidence and so he says a non-believer might say that faith is for the weak but this assertion overlooks the power of faith and I I've talked about this in previous episodes but that is not what those who leave the church say it's it's a complete straw man argument and the definition of Faith from The Book of Mormon is really um consistent with how I always understood it before I joined the church and so Alma 32 21 says if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen which are true and as I've said that when I grew up I was not obviously in in the church and I was I was more of a Protestant background the faith was the idea that you would believe in things that you cannot see and you cannot know for certain one way or the other and Not only was I taught that as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but I was taught that before because of the fact that the Book of Mormon really does reflect that Protestant you know Methodist view of the of the 18 or 19th century and the problem of Mormonism is that they're trying to redefine faith and make it not the Assurance of the existence in spite of what we have seen and so what they're saying is you know faith is about believing in things we cannot see but it's not about believing them in spite of what we can see what we can read what we can't understand about the evidence and so to say that you're overlooking the power of faith when someone comes across say the book of Abraham translation being wrong that's a horrible argument from Nelson because he's trying to basically tell you that you're just doing it wrong you're lacking faith if you're looking at very testable truth claims for Mormonism and actually testing them as Joseph Smith was telling everyone to do anything you want to add Nemo um sorry yeah I'm using myself there we go so yeah I think I've explained it with the whole idea of the doctor before and the idea that you know you put your faith in a doctor but then if you get evidence that he isn't qualified or has a drinking problem or any of these things then you shouldn't keep faith in him in spite of that Newfound evidence I think the easiest way to explain it would be you've got the things that faith can deal with in a circle and then you've got the things that evidence can deal with in a circle now as the sphere of evidence gets bigger the role of faith gets smaller because naturally it must do because it deals with the unknown and once you have evidence it becomes a known thing so as scientific advancements move forward in the world then the need for faith that people will get better decreases because the evidence that people will get better based on clinical trials and all these sorts of things increases so you're no longer having to pray for the recovery of people that could be treated by a evidence-based medicine I think that's the simplest way I can put it in in what faith should how Faith should act but as Mike said in Mormonism it acts differently I love it all right well let's go to the next slide yeah so this one is where Nelson is going to kind of invoke the bandwagon effect which we talked about um in a previous episode which is to say that you should know the church is true because others before you have given so much to be a part of it and I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here but other religions have had many more people die in Wars over their beliefs uh die for other causes it doesn't make what they believed anymore or any less real than the truth claims of Mormonism and so um as you listen to this clip I just want you to think about this 909 people died in Jonestown why would 909 people have willingly died in Jonestown if they didn't have faith at the people's Temple was not the one true belief one true church whatever you want to call it so I think we need to to focus on that as we listen to this clip from Russell Nelson because it really shows how this is such an ineffective argument and it just doesn't really hold up in any possible way I also want to just refer people to our episode on Mormon spiritual Witnesses and testimonies because uh it really just approaches the problem of epistemology within Mormonism which is the study of how people believe things and we've all been taught that if we have strong emotional experiences that that's the Holy Ghost bearing with this to us that something is true and obviously the problem with that is is that people in the flds church and Jim Jones and and the people's uh what is it um the ones who all did Death by suicide in California um Heaven's Gate like the the dudes who flew the planes into the Twin Towers the you know from the from Islam from from the Muslim faith like who what faith doesn't have people who have felt strong emotional feelings called that inspiration and then Christianity went on several Crusades yeah yeah it's just it's just the way it's just the way religion works is they get you to have strong feelings they tell you that it's God or the holy ghost or some Spirit confirming to you that it's true and then you've got thousands tens of thousands hundreds hundreds of thousands or millions or in the case of maybe Christianity broadly a billion people all telling you they believe it's true okay so now that we've poisoned the well then let's play uh Russell Nelson's uh clip would Joseph and Hiro Smith have suffered Martyrs deaths defending the restoration of the Lord's Church unless they had a sure witness that it was true would nearly 2 000 Saints have died along the Pioneer Trail if they did not have faith that the Gospel of Jesus Christ had been restored truly faith is the power that enables the unlikely to accomplish The Impossible do not minimize the faith you already have it takes Faith to join the church and remain faithful it takes Faith to follow prophets rather than pundits and popular opinion I mean it's just such incredibly bad poor thinking especially for someone who who has a training at the level of of a you know medical degree it's just such bad thinking yeah but John you're just a pundit mate yeah and it's effective I mean it's effective that's I I've had people tell me people I know and also people I've met through doing this that one of the things that holds them to the church is this idea that I have had Pioneer Heritage that I cannot walk away from because if I walk away from what does it say about my parents what does it say about my great-grandparents that they gave so much and I'm willing to walk away from it and so Nelson is definitely choosing these these words and choosing these Concepts carefully because he knows it's effective on getting members to refocus um their kind of mindset with with regards to Faith and so that's why he does I yeah I feel like as I said this has no bearing on the truthfulness of Mormonism either way it doesn't mean it's true it doesn't mean it's false because so many other religions have had way more people die way more people do things because they believed it was true but again it's effective when you're when you're speaking to an audience of Believers to hammer this home to make them plant that seed in their mind of look at all you're giving up if you walk away all these people before you did it and now you're gonna be the weak one the weak chain of the link yeah I mean can I can we just point to some of the factual accuracy of some of what he said would Joseph Smith and Hiram have suffered Martyrs deaths if they didn't believe it was true well they didn't exactly have much of a choice and Joseph Smith did do things to try and get out of that situation you know um it's not the whole lamb to a Slaughter thing that we were necessarily led to believe so this idea that he didn't necessarily want to die you know he didn't go well then kill me for my beliefs then you know he he tried to get out of it he tried to stop people coming into Nauvoo he he wasn't exactly the Placid laid down person that were meant to believe that he was in this situation and again that appealed to popularity about the sacrifice of the Pioneers for those that are the descendants of pioneers it's almost like a sunk cost fallacy it kind of it starts to lean into a bit of that it's like well your ancestors have already paid this price so are you going to squander it's the same thing that's used to kind of press people on the whole Jesus Christ died for your sins so are you going to then throw that thing away you know if someone else has already done this thing for you so it would be rude and wrong and horrible of you to then not live up to that thing that's someone else did yeah all that and I just want to add that people commit fraud all the time and face dire consequences as the result of their fraud whether it's Bernie Madoff you know or uh just all the Ponzi schemes all the financial fraud all the sexual um you know abuse that happens uh just criminal behavior in general people commit fraud all the time and end up being punished significantly for it so so just to make that argument why you know is it possible that someone would commit fraud and and and then face negative consequences like has he heard of the legal system has heard of the judicial system has heard of the criminal Criminal Courts like it's full of people who do that kind of stuff well and and just a Hammer home the one point where he says would hire him and Joseph have died if they didn't believe it it's like bullet did David Crush died did he not believe it I mean we have all these leaders who have died in throughout history did are we then trying to play the special pleading game of saying well our guys are really true because we believe it whereas those other guys we're kind of just crazy and believed it and I think that's we that's why this doesn't it has no relevance whatsoever but it's effective and so that's why he's doing it the scientific method would look a whole lot different if you'd got like University professors who had to like be willing to die or Jewel to the death and then that would prove that hypothesis true rather than just simple repeatability of results you imagine you know you've got String Theory versus whatever a couple of physicists do can get out to the death that's just not the way that we know things are true it's not are you willing to die for it it's is it repeatable yep yeah absolutely okay so let's go to the next slide yeah and so at the end of that little clip we play he talks about how you know the church doesn't change due to popular opinion or pundits and they really Hammer this home a lot which is a way to appeal to an US versus them mentality especially when you are being seen by society as a whole as being behind the times we see that today with the LGBT stuff and I just want to point out before we move on that the church has made a lot of big changes due to popular opinion that are massive changes uh they end up polygamy at least for time I know it's still Doctrine for eternity because the government basically said and the public as a whole said you can't do polygamy uh they remove the priesthood ban on members of African lineage black skin because the Civil Rights Movement was happening uh they had all sorts of issues with um potential you know lawsuits um BYU they had teams that were boycotting their games obviously at that point they were a good what 20 30 years behind the Civil Rights Movement to finally remove that ban um they removed the penalties in the temple ceremony uh where members used to have to repeat the Masonic penalties that you know basically you were miming you're killing yourself sledding your throat cutting your bowels out um if they revealed the temple ceremony uh They removed sexist some sexist language in the temple um that was rooted in polygamy where the wife gave herself to the husband but the husband gave himself to God uh They removed the November 2015 LGBT Revelation from God just three and a half years later with a second Revelation because members were not willing to accept such a discriminatory policy as well as you know public as a whole and allowing their parents to be with their children when they have interviews with the bishop uh were sexually explicit questions or asked young children happened because Sam young was basically got excommunicated trying to Rally people to stop allowing um Bishops to basically Force you know a situation where parents couldn't be in the room and so these are just a small list of really monuments some of the Monumental changes in the church that come because popular opinion forced them to change yeah absolutely Nemo you want to add anything yeah it's just it's almost the biggest lie that the church tries to tell the members to disempower them that you know we won't listen to you we get all that decisions from God but if members realize just how much power they actually have it's it's the same with a lot of organizations like this if the people at the bottom realize that they actually had a lot of power then they would be able to change so many things that they feel like they're stuck with because they've been convinced by the few people at the top I was watching a TV show the other day and um and essentially the people remark that what if there's actually only two or three people watching us down here what if they want us to think that there's loads of people here keeping us in but what if actually there's only a couple of them and it's the same in the church there's actually only a few people trying to tell us what to do but actually history of the church shows us that if the members feel that something is wrong and enough of them speak out it will change and change course yeah yeah John John Larson makes has made the point he he we have him on normal stories occasionally he's the former host of Mormon expression podcast he he makes the point that you really can't name a fundamental core Mormon doctrine that hasn't changed significantly since the founding of the church including the godhead right um you know including the priesthood you know take your pick the Book of Mormon itself uh has undergone many many significant changes you really can't name a core Mormon doctor that hasn't changed and if you really if you're open and you study the history you'll be able to find the origins of the changes coming out of you know uh social social dynamics and or relationships and or just new things that Joseph learned but primarily legal or social pressure so it's it's either a just a naive um just lack of of understanding about basic history and social dynamics on the part of Russell M Nelson or again it's the cynical um deception because he should know better about how much in fact Mormon Doctrine has changed over the years due to social pressure and that's uh that's the really weird thing about Ahmed Corbett when he starts saying the activism towards the church is not appropriate and is wrong and all this sort of stuff and he he is the beneficiary of that very activism that he's trying to stop because as a black man who can now hold the priesthood it is activism he has to thank for that and the other thing I just want to point out to lighten the mood slightly do you remember the ban on oral sex that the church had John supposed to be Kimball in the early 80s yeah it took them nine months to reverse that because so many members were infused like they incensed by that band it's the quickest turn around the church has ever done on something as far as I know nine months yeah yeah for them to reverse the ban on oral sex and I'm did you I'm looking at list did you did you mention uh Mike Sam Young's activism about what what that was the last one okay okay sorry sorry I was I was doing other work behind the scenes okay well good well let's go ahead and go to the next slide yeah and so um and one thing I'll say one thing one quick thing I'll say before that slide is to piggyback off at Nemo's point the church only has the power you give them and I think that's one of those things that was hard for me to learn um and especially uh the moment I really learned it was I was always told you never turned out a calling and I think I've told this before but I got to a point where I just I couldn't do it anymore I had issues with polygamy I had issues with the band of black and the ward I was in um I really didn't feel comfortable and it just got to a point where I want to go and so they knew that and so they kind of pulled me aside and like if you don't start going to more activities you're gonna fall away and I was like I'm not going to the activities so like two weeks later they're like we just prayed about you and we were told by you know Revelation or personal revelation that you need to be one of the counselors in um the elders Quorum and and I said no because I couldn't do it and it was that moment where you realize that the church doesn't have any power over me unless I give it to them and um to Nemo's Point that's why if enough people say enough's enough and you really actually put your foot down and realize the church is powerless unless you give them the power they will make changes so you know if you're a woman who's sick of not being able to hold the priesthood not being past the sacrament not being able to baptize your child that is where the more people that are willing to get together and actually make noise the quicker the change is going to be now the church will never immediately change because they don't want to be seen as caving but they they do a really good game of kind of waiting just long enough to wear kind of the initial upper is gone to make it go away um the November 15th policy is a great example where we had Mass resignations because the November 15 policy is really bad and it's a really bad knee-jerk reaction um to a same-sex marriage being legalized um through the Supreme Court court and it was one of those things where they had to wait a couple years to reverse it because they had to kind of do it so they didn't feel like it was uh directly because members were raising their voices and and it just shows again um that's why like people say what I'm still a member of the church and they'll say why don't you resign I'm like I don't really care they don't hold power over me so why am I going to go to them be like hey take my membership away because I want that gone I just don't care and so that's at least for me my way of saying you have no power for me so whatever you want to do doesn't really matter and I'm gonna stay a member because it's more important to other people than it is to me but the point is as Nemo said or picking back off Nemo the church only has the power you give them and you should always remember that when you're in an interview when you're being asked to do something that doesn't make sense because the moment you give them power is the moment they'll take it and they'll hold it over you and we've talked about that in previous episodes sorry for that little bit of a tangent but I think that's an important thing for it was an important thing for me to realize when I was kind of at the end of being able to to stay active I love it all right let's go to the next slide yeah so this last one is just uh one more final one on Nelson and this is just it's not necessarily about doubts this is more about faith and um Nelson is gonna he gives a story about his visit he visits um like all these different countries he's giving these talks and so in these visits it's raining a ton and so they're praying and they're fasting for the rain to stop before Nelson has these big events there and in Samoa and in Fiji the rain stops just in time for Nelson's talk but when he gets to Tahiti it keeps on raining despite their fasting and they're praying and so Nelson says the following faith faith sufficient to stop the rain and Faith to persevere when the rain did not stop it's just like he's talking about this as if as if the praying and the fasting had any impact and it's just it's the ultimate move by a church that wants to have it both ways and so Nelson might as well have said heads I win tails you lose because he's literally saying that faith and fasting stop the rain in Samoan Fiji while also saying that Faith wasn't enough to stop in Tahiti but also that the faith to persevere through a speech was just as good as a faith that didn't stop the rain and so if your head is spinning from that that's apologetics in the church even when things fail you find a way to spin it into a faith promoting story even if it basically contradicts the other part of the story that you're trying to tell and you see this a lot in the church it's the faith that with the faith to be filled the faith to be healed and now they say you have to have the faith not to be healed because obviously priesthood blessings don't actually heal people and so this is the same thing where you're saying in the church if you have faith and you're getting the answers you want that's God if you if you pray and you fast to get answers you don't get the answer that's God telling you to have more patience and that you need more faith to accept that you can't get those answers and it's just it's a really it's kind of funny if it wasn't so just kind of contradictory and kind of absurd in a lot of ways too Nemo it's it's almost like saying you know uh random chance happens and if it's good for you then that's Garden if it's not good for you that's God to but your fault that God didn't do what yeah it it makes no sense and at that point you may as well ask yourself well what's the point in praying because if I pray for a specific outcome and it doesn't happen and and that prayer has has no effect on whether it happened or not because we've just heard an example from the prophet that prayer works sometimes doesn't work other times so when am I just doing it on the off chance that it might and if it might just happen anyway then why would I you know do that it doesn't seem to make any sort of logical sense really to me yeah yeah it's kind of The House Always Wins idea or blame reversal that we've talked about in Luna Lindsey Corbin's uh amazing recovering agency Series in the Mormon Church The House Always Wins um it's head sidewind tells you lose kind of thing all right well let's move on to the church historian this is kind of a really recent development that that shocked many uh the current Mormon church historian this year admitted that there are compelling reasons to doubt set this up for us Mike yeah so this was just over the past month the past month and this is the new church historian Kyle McKay and he gives this talk to BYU Idaho and in he admits in the talk that there are compelling reasons to doubt the church's claims and so I want to give a big shout out um to radio frame Mormon because he had done a podcast about this already and he kind of gives a really really good breakdown of this talk and one of the parts that I thought was pretty cool was when uh Kyle McKay who's a lawyer because as we know Church historians are lawyers now um they're not historians they're lawyers and rfm said when he uses the word compelling that's an intentional choice of a word and so he looked it up in the dictionary and I looked it up after just so I could kind of copy and paste it into here and when you look up compelling they give you three basic meanings one is that it's forceful I.E it's a compelling reason to doubt uh one is that it is demanding attention I.E they're compelling reasons to doubt and so you need to pay attention and then the third is that it's convincing and so that would be to say the evidence was so compelling that it causes you to doubt and so as we said they're all lawyers they're choosing these words carefully and this is being given to a group of BYU Idaho students this is not being done by accident he is literally telling them that there are reasons to doubt the church that are compelling meaning that they are real that they are convincing and that is something that you just would not expect to hear a church historian in 2023 say so just to set that up before we watch the clip I yeah this is this was one of those ones where you you do a double take sure like he didn't just say that and he obviously did all right should we play it yeah let's play it all right let's play the clip is your foundation sure and certain enough that you can remain unshaken even if someone you admire in the faith makes a mistake now or in the future or in the past is your knowledge and testimony of truth strong enough that you can stare down compelling reasons to doubt and choose to believe have you learned the gospel the principles of the Gospel in such a way that you can do all this in the spring of 1837 for reasons that seemed legitimate to him Apostle Paulie P Pratt turned his back on the Prophet Joseph and tried to take others with him all right including all right Mike it didn't cut off on its own but yeah it's just just you know like I said just to point out that you know he's basically saying that you need to have the faith to basically be able to stay believing even if there are compelling I.E convincing arguments that the church isn't true and that is just it's pretty crazy for a historian to tell you basically that you should have faith to do it when he obviously has access to all the information that should be able to rebut those convincing arguments you know if he's well if he's saying stare down compelling reasons to doubt and choose to believe this is the problem because if they're compelling you should investigate them because if they're compelling they could be legitimate good reasons to doubt and therefore reasons to no longer believe so what he is promoting then is willful ignorance that's what he's advocating because he's he's advocating that people ignore compelling reasons to change their Paradigm and instead continue to believe the same things they always believed and ignore those things so it's just will for ignorance he's promoting which isn't good for people absolutely all right should we go to the next slide Mike yeah let's go to the next slide and we can just uh we'll play the clip first is your foundation okay here we go as you increase your effort so that's that's right yeah this is correct okay here we go you want to play the clip first okay yeah I might as well okay as you increase your efforts to increase your testimony you are likely to become confronted with reasons to doubt president Nelson cautioned quote don't pollute your testimony with false philosophies of unbelieving men and women close quote please hear me and understand there will always be some reason or another to doubt the truthfulness of this church and gospel there are arguments and evidence supporting the proposition that there is no God that Jesus was just a good philosopher teacher that Joseph Smith was simply a charismatic Storyteller and that this church and gospel are not true this evidence these arguments are on some level appealing and believable for there are many who believe them all right Mike yeah it's just to point out that he's trying to do a very common trick you see within Mormonism which is to tie God to Mormonism which is to say there are reasons to believe that maybe Jesus wasn't resurrected so but people believe it so that means you gotta believe in Mormonism and I think that's one of those uh areas where you look at that you're like that's not that's not a connection that holds up and he's trying to build off of Russell Nelson's talk about doubts um by telling people you don't rehearse your doubts with others but he's the church historian who has all the information and he knows the reasons that people doubt so he's at this this talk with BYU Idaho students basically telling them there's compelling reasons to doubt but I'm not going to tell you what those reasons are but I don't want you to talk to other people who do know them because you need to be afraid of what will happen if you find out and just as I've said before if this is a truly restored church with a living Prophet with churches stories with access to all this information why should there be so many compelling reasons to doubt that we can't actually be told what they are I just I feel like he's not saying the things that are really obvious here which is there's the only reason it's a doubt we can't tell you because we don't have answers for them emo uh it's it's absolutely right and and again it's strange to have someone actually explain what those reasons to doubt might be you know he does begin to touch on some of the things that people don't believe or some of the arguments that people make which is new that's different because normally they just don't touch on it at all but he's kind of trying to put down the appeal to popularity argument he's saying just because lots of people believe these things doesn't mean they're true and that's great that's fine that's good thinking you've got to weigh up the evidence yourself but the problem is the church tries to then use the appeal to popularity for their own good when they want to say would 2 000 people have died crossing the plains if it weren't true would this would that if it weren't true so they can't have their cake and eat it too on that one they can either say appeal to popularity is a logical fallacy um or they can you know start using themselves and with that there's my binary for you I hope it's not a false one it what to me what they're trying to do here as well is kind of like inoculate the members to any possible doubt and to just kind of say oh yeah you're gonna have doubts all the time that's the whole purpose that's the whole design the whole test of existence is that you will experience these doubts and and and then overcome them and in that sense they're kind of trying uh they they're trying to make themselves Invincible they're trying to say that the the doubts in the faith crisis you are going to experience is the test and in that sense it's an inoculation the problem is the inoculation metaphor points to a virus right a sickness and some would say that that religious belief is a sickness or a virus and I'm not gonna go that far I think there are ways to have religious beliefs in something bigger in something greater that that's actually healthier adaptive for many many people so I'm not the person that believes that all faith-based or religious beliefs are our illnesses but I would say that Faith or belief in something that isn't true in something that is truly harmful to people like a virus um resilient Faith or belief in untrue things is is a sickness and I think that's what strikes at the core of why this LDS discussion series exists it's okay to have faith or belief in innocuous in innocuous things or in things that are healthy or that are at least not disprovable but let's not have resilient faith in things that are built on fraud or falseness or deception or that cause a lot of harm to a lot of people is that fair yeah like I I think I've said it in a previous episode I think if someone wants to watch all these episodes and say I still believe fine but at the same time if you then go to next year's The Book of Mormon I believe or come follow me and you go to teach the Book of Mormon and you teach about gold plates and how Joseph Smith translated often you're showing pictures of him sitting at a table then you're you're being dishonest and I think that's where it comes down to which is if you want to have faith in something um that we can't disprove like Joseph Smith had a first Vision we weren't there we know that he changed the story we know it was a late edition okay but if you're then going to repeat things that we do know are proven just uh to be proven false then I think that's where we run the problems and so when you have a church that is continuing to push these narratives that we know are factually not true that is harmful even before getting into how it impacts people's lives because you're telling people something that we now know today is just simply not what the church claims it to be and that's not Faith that's something entirely different and I hate that the church tries to tie that um that Faith together and they also do it in a way where they bundle it in with God it's like as I've said before God does not need Mormonism and yet you saw the Elder Corbridge talk we talked about last episode where he says well if you believe in God then naturally you can get to Joseph Smith being a prophet and here we have a church historian basically saying well you know there's a lot of people who don't believe in God so clearly a lot of people are wrong with doubts which means anything that goes against Mormonism you know is the same thing and it's like no no no it's not at all the same thing because the a lot of the the ideas of did Jesus get resurrected we can't really know where there's a lot of the truth claims of Mormonism we can test now because Joseph Smith gave us very testable claims and now we have the ability to do that Nemo there there are deep and long-standing Theological arguments about God uh they've been going on for a long time and Mormon Scholars generally don't tend to scratch the surface of some of those like the question of evil we've seen I shouldn't say Mormon Scholars the Mormon leaders try and touch on the question of evil and just unable to to deal with it particularly I think renlin tried to give a talk about infuriating unfairness he starts to touch on the problem of evil and then just can't so so I don't think it's honest for them to hide behind some of these very big and difficult theological questions to uphold Mormonism which the the unique claims of which are easily um easily refutable yeah I would say all right well let's go ahead and go to the next slide shall we yeah in this next one it kind of um in a lot of ways mirrors some of the ones we talked about in our first uh part of this this doubts the first episode on doubts which is you're telling college students that doubts are coming from Satan and that they're evil and I just I feel like uh as I've said in previous episodes Elder McKay here saying that doubts are bad and that we need choose we need to choose not to doubt because ultimately you come from Satan it once again shows that in Mormonism the god of Mormonism is completely powerless and that Satan is really powerful and I think that's another thing where you see it in a lot of these episodes you know I know I've mentioned in a few of them and it's like why is Satan being blamed for the very clear mistakes of Joseph Smith or for the church as a whole it's like did Satan cause Joseph Smith to have field Revelations to translate the book of Abraham wrong to use bad biblical scholarship when he's recording Revelations from God and I think that's the problem it's like you can't blame Satan for the problems of the church but you're trying to put the idea of doubts of finding out the information on the same which I think is just such a just an absurdly dishonest approach and so I just want I know probably as Nemos joked earlier I'm poisoning the wall here but as you listen to um Elder McKay talk here the church historian about how doubts are from Satan just ask yourself why is it that in the Mormon Church Satan is so much more powerful than God all right let's roll the clip shall we now I want to be clear by acknowledging the existence of reasons to doubt I am not legitimizing them and I am certainly not advocating or excusing doubt itself Jesus said doubt not in the face of reasons to doubt doubt not and what did you think Satan would throw up flimsy easily dismissable reasons to doubt no they will be flattering and enticing if the Prince of Darkness can transform himself into an angel of Light then surely he can put forth ideas and arguments that appear enlightened one of Lucifer's tactics is to play Upon Our natural human tendency to project natural human Tendencies on God ignoring or forgetting the fact that his ways and his thoughts are different from and higher than ours we sometimes try to create or recreate God in our image so that he and his Doctrine align with our thoughts our ways our shifting sympathies and evolving values discovering that God and His Doctrine are not shifting or evolving but Everlasting and unchanging can become a reason to doubt for oh my gosh Mike is it okay if I jump in here for a second feel free like so so first of all like the fact that he just made the assertion that the Mormon Doctrine is Everlasting and unchanging did we do have we done an episode on LDS discussions about all the different fundamental core Mormon doctrines that have changed because if we haven't we need to add that right now if we done that we haven't done that might be one to add for later too because okay so it definitely is a good so Mike Will you right now annotate that on our list of new LDS discussions topics we got to cover I'll add it to the spreadsheet because there there's a there's a really important changing Doctrine I'm adding that right now there's a book um by Charles Harrell uh Charles Harrell he was a BYU professor at the time um this is my Doctrine there's a Mormon story there's a book about it and and it's called This is my doctor in the development of Mormon theology there's also a Mormon stories episode um and I think at some point uh Mormonism live uh uh or or Radio free Mormon have interviewed this guy but it's basically a book that goes and shows all the different ways Mormon Doctrine has changed in critical crucial ways over the years I just want to say that's just such a Canard it's so outrageous that they're still pulling that out the second thing I want to say about this dude Kyle McKay is that it's a it's a conspicuous cult tactic or tactic of a high demand religion to try and use the emotion that's the e in the bite model to invoke Satan and to pair Satan with doubt is clearly an a tactic to make people terrified or afraid to doubt it's manipulative it's gross and the church needs to stop it he's got me upset now and uh and that's what he's doing invoking Satan is that with vulnerable young adults who have been curated to to fear and to trust Church Authority he's now saying if you have doubts Satan is going to get a hold of you they do it in the Mormon Temple ceremony he's with with Satan and Lucifer in the temple ceremony he's doing it here and it's gross the final thing I'm going to just add is um I this is something that I referenced uh last episode as well there's an amazing book called doubt a history um by Jennifer Michael Hecht uh it's subtitled the great doubters and their legacy of innovation from Socrates and what will somebody tell me what word comes after Socrates and Nemo or Mike from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson and if I can just read read her a description of this book this is an account of the world's greatest intellectual virtuosos who are also Humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers from the ancient Greek philosophers Jesus and the Eastern religions to Modern secular equivalence Marx Freud and Darwin and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaningless of the universe with the human need for meaning we we doubt and we doubt to our own success as a species doubt is a virtue not a vice and no one should know this more than Kyle s McKay because Joseph Smith himself began the restoration by the church's own account by doubting the the Christian uh debates and theologies of the day and when when he quotes Jesus Christ as saying doubt not that can't be a more glib I can't imagine a more glib interpretation of Jesus's own teachings than to say that Jesus was just universally condemning all doubt because he doesn't provide any other interpretation he's just saying don't doubt Jesus said Doubt's evil and I just that's so glib it's so maddening somebody please rescue me from a raving rant well I'll rest I'll rescue you John okay by informing the viewers that the reason I look in intelligent on this shows because John always steals my points except I'm sorry now I'm left with nothing to say no it's fine you've made some really good points Nemo if you reiterate my points it'll make me feel validated okay plus repetition is a key to memory so please repeat my points well okay so he may I want to start with with the point you didn't make and then I'll repeat your points through the course of it he said that by acknowledging the existence of Reason stood out I'm not legitimizing them well why did he call them compelling then and then he goes on to undermine that statement by saying that you know of course Satan isn't going to flows throw flimsy arguments your way and of course invoking Satan is a way to emotionally manipulate people because we've been taught to fear Satan our entire life so it will bring up that fear in us and anything that is from say to be run away from especially what will make people fearful is if they can't trust what they see which is why it brings up this example of Satan being able to appear as an angel of Light because well then how do I know if I'm seeing an angel light or Satan how do I know if what I'm getting is from God or from Satan if Satan has a level of power the answer is follow the brother Nemo that's that's how you know always learn for yourself so you've just got to trust them because Satan Satan's good enough to deceive you individual member of the church but he won't deceive us so just follow us but we've made this point a billion times which prophets do we follow do we follow Brigham Young Who said you have to have plural marriage to reach in at least three wives to reach the Celestial Kingdom do we follow Wilford you know Woodruff who who you know declared that polygamy should be ceased like which which prophet do we believe right the one that's alive because a living Prophet is more important than a dead Prophet according to Ezra Taft Benson do we believe Nelson do we believe Russell Nelson who said that the that the exclusion policy was Doctrine or the Russell and Nelson that later um unwounded you know which do we believe you can play both both at the same time apparently um and you get a gold medal in mental gymnastics if you manage it uh the last two points I just want to make about that he says shifting sympathies and evolving values he says that in such a derogatory way but if God is God's Not evolving if these things aren't changing then what's the point in a continuing restoration that Russell and Nelson keeps harping on about and saying you've just seen the beginning take your pills get your rest even though loads of other people said to church have been restored he's coming out and saying well it's ongoing one of the biggest value propositions we've talked about earlier of the Mormon church is ongoing Revelation and a prophet that speaks to God so out of all the churches that should be able to be Progressive and change and non kind of rigidly conservative you would imagine it would be the LDS Church that's what you have going for you sorry my dog's moaning at me so you guys carry them no I love it uh Mike what do you want to add I just would point out just the the simple fact that you know I feel like I've said this a few times but when you come out and you say excuse me one sec and you come out and you say did you really think Satan would be that powerless against you and you're talking about how he can impersonate angels of light it's just as Nemo said it's like well that's the same crap you heard from Joseph Smith where someone would say Joseph I was or Hyrum page uh gets Revelations off of his own stone and a hat and then Joseph's like yep from the devil and then someone else like Joseph I was visited by an Angel and he's like well the angel did the angel shake your hand right uh what color was the Angel's Hair it's always this this little thing where it's like Satan is so good and powerful they could trick everybody except for the leaders who need you to be loyal to them and I feel like that is something we've seen over and over in these episodes and I know from a believing perspective you're like well you're you're not giving them the right context you're their perspective but how many times you need to see that before you go they're using Satan as a tool to keep you in this box and um as Nemo said too this idea that he's like you can't expect God to be in your image uh to change with the times but the Mormon Church always makes God in their image they've literally done that since Joseph Smith kind of changed from like what was you know at the time or the trinitarian modalist Viewpoint it made God exactly what he had learned through his theology as you know as a you know as a tabernacle of Flesh right now I'm trying to think of the phrase um and then um the idea that we you know we we obviously we we paint uh Jesus and in certain ways we paint God all these different ways that the Mormon Church envisions them so they're doing the exact same thing that the church historian is telling that people we can't do and I just feel like it's one of those appeals to Authority it's like ultimately it's like well I'm having doubts and then all of a sudden they go oh don't don't doubt those okay well can you give me some answers and it's like no just trust me and and that's that's not the way an organization that has confidence in their claims would act especially the church historian who has access to more information than anyone else yeah and I'll just I'll just reiterate what I've already said which is Stephen Hassan the world's expert in Colts wrote a book called combating cult mind control where he lays out an acronym for how Colts work and it's the bite model and the e in byte stands for emotional manipulation and I I want to uh maybe there's really a Satan in the world but for those of you who are seeking truth and Enlightenment I want to propose to you to consider the possibility that the invocation of Satan by religious leaders Mormon and not is an attempt to emotionally manipulate people maybe you don't believe that I'm just putting that out there I'm advancing that as something to consider and in this case I think he's absolutely Kyle McKay is absolutely doing that can I just put forward a quick point about the problem with a lawyer being the church historian sure and it's something I mentioned because I I did a podcast about this tell me and the preventions got together did a panel discussion about this talk um and one of the things I said was that the problem with having a lawyer as a church historian is that while the skill set of a lawyer and a historian do overlap I.E they both examine evidence it's what they then try to do with that evidence that's very different historians when they examine evidence try and come to an objective analysis of what occurred lawyers when they examine evidence try and argue what happened depending on what side they represent and it's it's a big difference between the two and it's really important because it shows you why the church would want to use lawyers rather than actual historians because lawyers will fight the side of the church and use the available evidence to further the church's cause as though the church were their client rather than just looking at the evidence and giving an objective view of what the evidence what the what story the evidence tells yeah thanks Nemo all right Mike are we ready for the next slide yeah I just would say with Nemo's comment that that is absolutely the reason that these historians because Urban style use lawyers for historians because historians they want all the information because they want to get to the truth being a historian is not about you know trying to privilege one side or the other it's about what happened um whereas a lawyer is going to take the approach of an apologetic approach which is what Kerry mulestein says where you know this is a church historian who's not saying I want to know what's true they're saying I want to know what's Faith promoting that I can let out to the public and and that is another way that you're controlling information over the people that you're then using your Authority as a church historian to say oh I know all this stuff it's not a big deal but I'm not going to show you what it is I'm going to tell you there's reasons to doubt I'm not going to tell you what those reasons are and that alone should be a red flag when people are like yeah there's compelling reasons to now to doubt this church and then they're like and those are and they don't tell you a single thing and I think that's a red flag for anyone I should say this guy is is hiding something from me and as Nemo points out it's by time that there's a reason that a lawyer is a church historian and has been I think since Leonard Arrington so this is not a coincidence it's not an accidental choice this is a deliberate Choice by the Mormon church to have a lawyer as a historian so they can protect the church Above All Else yeah and I and for those of you who are new to these Mormon discussions you need to learn the story of Leonard Arrington who was a who was the last professional historian as far as I know to have been hired as official church historian maybe the only one because prior to him it was like Howard W Hunter who is an attorney and before that it was just a feeling Smith forever and before that it was like BH Roberts who was not a trained historian um but they did hire one of one uh credible uh professional PhD level historian Leonard Arrington he served from 1972 to 1982. he was called a church historian in general conference but simply as a faithful historian producing faithful history that caused so many problems at Church Headquarters that by 1982 they quietly released him and did not release him in general conference and since then they've only hired attorneys since this is absolutely factual check out Greg Prince's book on the on the history of Leonard Arrington check out signature books uh several books on Leonard Arrington check out Leonard arrington's own biography called Adventures of a church historian it was absolutely a book that was crucial in my uh uh unraveling of Orthodox Mormon faith and coming to an awareness of factual church history it's really important stuff all right Mike let's jump to the next slide we spent a lot of time on that previous slide yeah let's let's play the video first before we listen to or before we before I talk about it actually we'll go back one one back one slide I think yeah so let's let's listen to this one then we can talk about it after okay here we go it was and finally there's Joseph Smith mistake prone at times just like the Ancients but God called and magnified him in the greatest restoration of Truth ever and what about you if the truthfulness of this church or the truthfulness of your beliefs were judged by your errors would anyone ever believe what you believe would there have been fewer mistakes fewer messes if God had only restored his church and gospel through you yes so what do we do with error you can't hide or hide from the humanness of humans but it is equally unproductive to seek out error and wallow in it by making it an emphasis of study you will never come to know and understand the truths of God by studying the errors of man nor has God appointed you or me or anyone to be an ongoing Arbiter of error in his leaders scrutinizing every word or act of Apostles and Prophets to make sure they fit within our current understanding of correctness that is not his plan that is not his order I feel cold out I I just want to let you all know that I have been called as by God as an Arbiter of Truth amongst his leaders uh and I will continue to hold them accountable kidding um so he started off with a two quote argument there um this whole idea of well could you do any better well that's not the point we're examining what Joseph Smith did doesn't matter whether I could have done any better or not he's the one that claimed to have God guiding him and restoring his church through him so we need to look at him we don't it doesn't matter it's a complete it's a complete logical fallacy to even begin to examine my ability to do what Joseph Smith claimed he could do there's a quote extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence right indeed he's making the claim to have talked to God so we don't need to meet some unreasonable standard of perfection and often when I'm talking with one of the things I do at Thrive events I'll talk to people about logical fallacies in conversation and I'll tell people don't get caught up defending yourself um when you're discussing someone else because if the discussion turns to you somehow well that's not what discussion's about so don't worry about it anyway the other thing he said um don't study errors you'll never come to know the truth of God by studying the errors of man well that's the complete antithesis to Improvement through self-reflection and there's the idea that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it um so the way to Godliness is wisdom Joseph Smith said things like that which is gained by learning uh wisdom is learning from your own mistakes and the mistakes of others so um error should absolutely be the focus of us to have our study the errors of others and our own so that we can avoid them yeah yeah there's just so much I find distasteful in this talk again this idea that you know oh don't you know give Joseph a break everybody makes mistakes yeah but not everybody claims to be God's mouthpiece not everybody claims to produce ancient scripture not everybody takes 35 wives 14 year olds mother sister pairs uh you know Sister pairs mother daughter pairs um not everybody commits financial fraud on a mass scale um and uh you know leads people to the brink of of annihilation and so it you know and not everybody produces what what turns out to be demonstrably fraudulent scripture or you know uh or um what's the word uh in in college when you uh steal someone's work like uh plagiarism like plagiarism not not everybody commits plagiarism so you know that that that argument of like are you perfect then don't judge judge Joseph Smith again I'm being repetitive this idea that people seek out and wallow like none of us sought out just problems to wallow in it it's it's more like Joseph's lies have leaked out and burst forth over time and whether it's Beach Roberts discovering things check out the secret Mormon meetings of 1922 where where egyptologists started to uncover the the book of Abraham as being a false translation or BH Roberts himself as church historian starts discovering problems via science to the to the Book of Mormons uh claims to be uh historical whether it's Von Brody's book who was Fon Brody the niece of David O McKay all she was doing was trying to write a faithful biography of Joseph Smith just through reading the original Source documents uncovers that Joseph Smith was engaged in in sexually um predatory behavior and fraudulent Behavior none of us are just or Leonard Arrington who was just trying to publish history starts uncovering severe problems with the church's core narratives like none of us are just seeking out and wallowing in problems with church history were just like trying to prepare our Seminary or our Sunday school lessons and just by just trying to seek out factual knowledge we come across factual evidence that disproves the core Mormon church truth claims um you know and and so I I'm just so sick of them blaming the victims for uh fighting the church's attempts to keep us from learning the truth we we heroically and courageously uncover the factual evidence and and they're trying to shame us for it it's so tiring yeah and I just that's you know the point I was gonna make is the same thing where it's like he asks do you think he could have done a better job it's like yes 100 yes I mean read ldsdiscussions.com right yeah or it's just like you know I wish someone in the crowd had had the courage to be like yeah I could because it's like look the these are not mistakes like Joseph Smith was married to dozens of women having sex with at least 10 women behind his wife's back would I have done better yes I would have been first of all if an angel with a drawn sword came up but like listen go talk to my wife you're wasting your time talking to me I don't know why you're even here that that's number one number two with the book of Abraham I would have been like look guys I don't know where this came from it was a revelation this Papyrus was just a you know I don't know what I'm doing but this is what came from God Joseph Smith made very testable truth claims we can test them they're false those are not you know scrutinizing mistakes those are not looking for the flaws um this is a church historian that is kissing up to Russell Nelson in his doubt from two years ago he's referencing all these points don't look for the flaws in the prophets because guess what that elevates the church if you don't look for their flaws and as I've we've said so many times in these two episodes on doubts if you go to any other part of your life and they say I don't want you to look for the flaws and what we're trying to sell you you'd be like yeah I'm out of here because you're clearly trying to hide something and yet within Mormonism we're supposed to be like oh yeah that's Faith it's like nope that's not faith and just to be perfectly clear the idea that the church wants to tell you on one hand God works through flawed problematic people like Joseph Smith on the other hand like you think you could do better it's like what what are we doing here I mean yes I could do better because I would not do some of the things Joseph Smith did because I'm not going to cheat on my wife behind her back without telling her and then when she finds out go God told me to do it didn't you know I mean like that's the thing we can look at DNC 132 as we did in our episode and show that it's just it's historically wrong he uses bad biblical scholarship Joseph Smith broke every rule within it those are not mistakes that is Joseph Smith relaying something that he claims us from God that we now know cannot be because it's got bad scholarship and obviously then his behavior almost becomes secondary to that it yeah I mean I don't want to rant either but it's just this idea of putting the blame on the members is ridiculous better from a Mormon perspective is problematic and open to shifting goal posts because he's the one that gets to determine better it's like do you think you could do better well do what better exactly like start a religion I possibly couldn't start a religion that would get to the size that and and the wealth amassed that the LDS church has got to possibly I couldn't could I have done better borrowly probably you know these are the there's so many shifted goal posts you'd say okay I could do better than immortally yes well could you get so many people to follow you okay well then maybe but then maybe John delinquote he's got enough people to follow him on YouTube so he's like oh well yeah but he's got to be a religion so there'll just be these shifting goal posts all the time so you could never make that argument Tim you could do better because better is defined by him that's true yeah and again I'm just gonna say that a common cult technique is blame reversal where you're where where if you have faith or if you faith if you put your trust in a church or a cult or religion and it works out they take the credit but if anything goes wrong it's always your fault you're always blamed and to blame people who lose Mormons who lose their faith over history or over the church's mistreatment of marginalized populations they're the victims of abuse and misinformation they are not um they are not the problems they're not to be blamed and it's outrageous that they're doing that um all right so let's go ahead and go to the next slide we're almost done here yeah and you could play this one too we could talk about it after all right let's play it this is the the church historian says answers to doubts uh are not the solution brothers and sisters I hope you realize that having perplexing questions that arise from reasons to doubt is not a problem But please understand finding answers to these perplexing questions ultimately is not the solution the solution is a sure and certain Foundation whereon if you build you cannot fall that Foundation is Jesus Christ and his gospel the fullness of which is found and taught here in his what's wrong with that Mike it's absurd if you like this is just it's that he is taking the down H Oaks one which by the way a lot of people when we talked about the Dallin H Oaks quote that research is not the answer uh immediately attacked me and said I was taking him out of context and that's not what he meant here the church historian is repeating it and making crystal clear yeah that's what they mean um to tell college students you're in college to learn to research to study to grow that finding answers to your question is not a solution is one of the most it's just it's it's insane like this is one of those things where you would think it was a parody of someone making a a parody video of a church apologist because it's so egregious to tell college students that finding answers to your questions is not going to be the solution to your doubts it's just this is this is just it's John I don't know what else to say it's crazy could you play the opening of that again just until he says it's not the solution sure yeah brothers and sisters I hope you realize that having perplexing questions that arise from reasons to doubt is not a problem okay it's not a problem but please under yeah and then he says but please understand that finding answers to these questions is not the solution right that's what he says yeah did he says no doubt not that Jesus said don't to doubt at all no but but he's saying having questions because they they like to delineate between questions and doubts right yeah they're like say questions to find but doubts on but what's really interesting here like he's he if he for a lawyer he's been really lazy with his words because he's saying that having perplexing questions arising from doubts is not a problem and then he goes on to say but finding answers is not the solution not the solution to something that you said wasn't a problem so why does it require a solution what are you actually telling me here he's trying to say that it's not the solution but I shouldn't be looking for a solution because you've just told me it's not a problem so it clearly is a problem and you and you realize that we clearly feel it's a problem and so you're saying that the answer to this problem is not to look for answers so there's going to be a lot of empty exam textbooks a lot of empty exam papers at BYU Idaho this year because lots of people are going to say if they're pressed as well I was told that finding answers to these things is not the solution so you know what I I didn't study before this is these people have paid for an education they've not paid to be indoctrinated yeah and I think it's wrong that they get someone like this to speak to these students and say such anti-intellectual things add a place of higher education I find that problematic personally ironically one of my favorite memories as a college student was at BYU the Lord's University where the professor wrote up on the chalkboard the university is the pl is not the place to have your questions answered it's the place to have your answers questioned and that's you know that that was a BYU professor who is still a living faithful believing Mormon who wrote that up on the chalkboard I like that a lot more Mike I just I it's one of those things where you just get to a point where you just I feel like they're giving the game away it's just that members don't see it because you're so conditioned not to to pick these things up but they're literally screaming at you we have no answers don't look for them and we we've shown throughout all these episodes why they're not telling people what these problems are they're saying there's compelling reasons to doubt I'm not going to tell you what those are um it's okay to have questions but don't find the answers and I've mentioned Stephen Hassan's bite model before and I'm going to mention it again here because the I and the T in the byte model stand for information and thoughts Cults are high demand religions want to control the information that that comes to you but the main reason why they want to control the information is because they want to control your thoughts they don't ever want the thought occurring to you that what they're teaching you may not be true or that they might be misleading you or withholding information from you um but that's exactly what the Mormon if the Mormon church has a history of anything that's very consistent it's 200 plus years of withholding fact actual truthful information from its members and deceiving them that is why so many people in the modern area have lost their faith in Mormonism because they feel misled and deceived it wasn't until my thirties that I learned that Joseph Smith had over 30 wives that that many of them were teenagers that at least two of them were were as young as 14 years old uh it was it wasn't until my 30s you know three decades in the church until I learned that the book of Abraham was a was a fraudulent or false translation that the Book of Mormon had all these egregious anachronisms uh and and you know until I learned about the Mountain Meadows Massacre and all the other problems with the Mormon church that Joseph Smith used a peep Stone in a hat to translate The Book of Mormon it's the whole reason this LDS discussion series exists is because the Mormon church has two centuries of deceiving and misleading people and it's intentional it goes back to to the byte model of controlling information so we can control your thoughts and this thing that McKay is doing right here telling you not to doubt pairing doubt with Satan making you fear doubts and telling you ridiculously that the solution to doubts is not to question and to learn it's to just believe and follow the Brethren that's overt explicit thought control and it's you know go back to my Stephen Hassan interviews or check out combating cult mind control or recovering agency this those titles recovering agency why did Luna Lindsay Corbin name her name their book recovering agency it's because while the Mormon Church preaches free agency it's systematically withholds free agency by limiting the information you receive and trying to control the thoughts that you have it's coercion it's undue influence and why does Stephen Hassan call it the bite model why does he call these organizations Cults because in Stephen Hassan's perspective it's mind control it's literally controlling your mind by controlling the information and controlling your thoughts so that you will do the church's bidding and that's the whole reason we have the LDS discussion series is to help free your mind to liberate you from the thought control of these 80 and 90 year olds who are literally trying to just get you to pay pray and Obey and that doesn't mean the Mormon church is fully evil that doesn't even mean we want you to leave the Mormon church but we do want you to have your life back I'm ranting but I'll say one final thing we have a podcast called The Gift of the Mormon faith crisis at mormonfaith crisis.com why did we name it the gift of the Mormon faith crisis because the gift of having a Faith crisis in Mormonism is the rest of your life you get your life back and that doesn't mean you have to leave the Mormon Church some do some don't but what we think everybody deserves is informed consent about what it is that they've given their lives to and then the freedom to make informed decisions once they have all the information and that's what Mormon stories is dedicated to and that's what LDS discussions is dedicated to and that's why I love you too all right Mike no I mean I I like I said I I think when we look at these episodes as a whole that we've done throughout the series you can understand now that we're getting towards these episodes that are not necessarily about history but about how the church portrays itself today you they have the same access to information we do Kyle McKay has access to more information than we do and the fact that he's telling members doubts are from Satan uh researching your doubts as Alan Oaks said but finding so finding answers to your questions this is the solution is just crazy I mean imagine that again in any other scenario whether it's religious non-religious it just it goes against any common sense but at the same time this is being written by a church historian who is a lawyer with the intentional um end game of keep these members in the church these are college students that are getting into that part period of the life where they're going to encounter more stuff about the church and this is to basically get them afraid of information get them afraid even if they find solutions that tell you the church is true they're saying that still is not worthy of answering your doubts and I think that you know um I prefer to call Mormonism a high demand religion I know cult is a very loaded term but these are things that should not be happening in any healthy religion or organization and yet we're seeing them over and over in the Mormon church not just with adults but with youth with the Redlands devotional where you have like eight-year-old kids hearing it um the Corbridge talk this talk or both the colleges the Russell Nelson one was General Conference to everybody down Oaks was to a group in Chicago I think if there were some I think it was young adults and so this is to all ages that it's happening it's by Design there are themes that you see throughout these talks it's intentional and it's just you know as we said these episodes are designed to give you the information you're going to do with it what you want but at the same time I hope at least you could see that the answers you're getting from the church through the gospel topics essays through Saints they're not holding up and so you then have to ask yourself why can they not give us the full picture while still asking us to remain faithful and to do all of the things that are required to be a you know an active member in good standing Nemo I want to get you in here but if I if it's okay I just because you mentioned it I'm going to share this survey Nemo that you just put out on EX Mormon Reddit um basically Nemo asked the question what was the first quote anti-mormon material you encountered and I thought it was interesting that tied for number one with the CES letter right now after 73 votes is what at the very bottom Nemo and Mike what's the topics essays right so like let's just let that sink in for a second it took the Mormon church like almost 200 years to start being honest about its history and so in 2014 or 13 or 14 it comes out with these gospel topics essays that just begin to to speak honestly about things like the book of Abraham about polygamy um you know about the Mountain Meadows Massacre Etc and it's already become the top reason for people losing their faith a tied with the CES letter does that not speak volumes Mike and Nemo Nemo let's have you go next it it does it shows that there was a reason a very good reason from the church's perspective why they didn't let people see this stuff and because it's because that they had been perpetuating a narrative that this stuff contradicts the contents of the Gospel topics essays contradicts the mainstream narrative that they have been teaching the correlation committee has put together Church materials and church um curriculum or curriculi I think it is um they put these together knowing that the narrative they were trying to teach people was undermined by certain things and then when transparency was forced upon the church it broke a lot of people's trust in the church because they'd been taught a narrative that was determined not to be true by the church's own materials yeah Mike we really should have it I'm going to add to the LDS discussions list just the churches um hiding of History a summary because all the efforts that the Mormon church has made to hide its history and to punish the truth tellers that's it's outrageous and and we need to make its own its own episode Mike or people just won't they won't see it from from all the excommunications in the 1900s from like it's like William law first presidency member excommunicated for trying to reveal Joseph's polygamy Oliver cowdery excommunicated for calling Joseph out on his adultery with Fanny Alger you know all the way through to um the the danites and then Brigham Young and uh all the all the lying about the the Mormon the Mormon Church sending missionaries to England lying that polygamy is happening back in Salt Lake City when it was actually polygamous that we're telling people that no polygamy was happening back in Salt Lake City all the way through to the second Manifesto where the church promises to not commit polygamy to the world and they keep practicing it all the way up to Apostles and Prophets through the the BH Roberts secret more meetings of 1922 all the way through to the excommunication of Fawn McKay Brody to the Leonard Arrington administrations of church history to the silencing of dialogue in Sunstone in the 70s and 80s and 90s to the excommunication of the September 6 all the way through to the internet and and and the excommunication of people like me and Bill real and and uh and others like it's just it's just exhausting and revealing how hard the Mormon church has worked over two centuries to mislead and deceive its people not to mention the way it's treated Gerald and Sandra Tanner and others yeah I mean it's it's it's one of those things where it's like sometimes I think people don't necessarily care of the sausages made but it is important to to look at how um Michael D Michael Quinn did all this work was excommunicated and a lot of his work is now used in the gospel topics essays which is just really it's both sad and kind of you know it's not funny but it's just like ironic that yeah or or the Pharmaca or the or the or the rough Stone Rolling Richard bushman's book reveals nothing interesting that wasn't revealed in Fawn McKay Brody's book no man knows my history I I believe Von McKay Brody is the most cited Source in Richard bushman's rough Stone Rolling and yet you know Fama K Brody was excommunicated because she released the book in 1945 but because you know Richard Bushman wrote a super boring long book and pulled a few punches his book is sold a Deseret Book you know while father McKay Brody was excommunicated yeah yeah I mean it's just it's just the way it goes that's what I was saying earlier it's not about the fact it's about whose side you're on yep yeah that's that's good that's a good that's a good quote Nemo all right well should we go to the final slide then uh Mike yeah I think we can all right let's do it and you know like I said I don't really know what more to say about all of these talks we've covered in these two episodes but these are all from the last five years from the last episode in this episode and I chose them intentionally because they are being taught to the youth right now they're being taught to uh the older members of the church young adults as I just mentioned uh through both the current leaders the prophet the historians of the church and as I've been kind of talking throughout these two episodes members of the church would recoil if they heard these lines being used on their children by any other religious leader or politician or a teacher and yet these talks are being given to make members afraid of doubts to be afraid of looking under the hood of these problems and to most importantly be afraid of friends and family that have doubts and to ultimately circumvent our critical thinking so that we stay in the church and we don't think about it and I I think if there's one lesson to take away from these episodes is that doubts are a good they're a great thing and even if they end up being painful because the journey leads you to have to change your Paradigm to change your core beliefs whatever the case might be ultimately doubts are a great thing because you're going to get answers um that are going to help you to make better decisions going forward it's not something to be afraid of and I think one of the things we've talked about in these episodes is just if you apply the the thinking of the church to other aspects of your life it would greatly hamper your ability to make good choices you know when um for example the church historian says if there's compelling reasons to doubt you shouldn't look at them I mean just imagine if you had a loved one come to you and say I have compelling reasons to think that your spouse is being unfaithful and you're just like no I'm just going to choose to believe he's faithful or she and all of a sudden years go on and you find out you've been lied to and all of a sudden you realize you could have made your life uh have a better path and as John said going through this process sucks going through the process of learning the Mormon Church's truth claims are not true it sucks it's not fun it's painful you feel isolated you feel alone um but at the end of the day it does give you a lot of your own Freedom back it gives you your agency back for real because now your free agency isn't the choice to obey a church but it's the ability to choose your conscience to to do what you think is going to be right for your community and for your family and um you know just to close up by saying as I mentioned earlier if you hear this from another religion your response is going to be that that this is just a horrible way to to try to get members to stop thinking and there's no amount of special pleading to try to erase the fact that the Mormon church is doing that repeatedly and if they had the confidence in their truth claims they would not be taking this approach they'd be a general conference pounding the podium saying we have the truth go out and research it you're going to find out it's true and it said its exact opposite and that should be all you really need to know about about what the church believes about their own ability to back up their claims all right Nemo you want to add anything yeah just a really quick story uh about a TED Talk I watched where a magician said that one of the greatest skills of being a magician is being able to see things from other people's perspective because being able to see things from other people's perspective is how you make the magic work because you understand what they're gonna see when you do the trick um and it's about making sure that they enjoy the the magic show um and I think what's really important for all of us is to be able to try and put ourselves in other people's shoes so if we want to try and put ourselves in the shoes of someone from another Faith looking at this we would see how they would view these things and that would be helpful to us then trying to objectively determine is this a good way of thinking and similarly if you can put that other the put Karma K as a member of another religious group and say what he's telling me if you remember another religious group how would I view that being able to put yourself in those sorts of mental spaces would be really healthy for your thinking and will help you come to better decisions I think so that's what I would encourage that would be my homework that I would set all the listeners I love it all right well Mike and uh Nemo this has been a great episode I hope that our viewers and listeners have enjoyed it we do have a few more episodes to record the spring of 2023 before we take a Hiatus for the summer um uh Mike you want to tell us what what's left for the LDS discussion Series yeah I think we've got our next episode I believe is I'm going to go over some of the miracle stories from Russell Nelson which is going to have Radio free Mormon which I'm excited about um I think that one's a really important one especially when you when you use the spiritual witness this episode and the Transfiguration of Brigham Young episode The Russell Nelson's Miracle Stories episode is going to make a lot more sense um we're also gonna have an episode on um apologetics and we're gonna have an episode on it basically if Joseph Smith got it right then who got it wrong and the idea is just kind of turning kind of the way we're thinking about all of this upside down to say okay let's just assume Joseph Smith did get it right what does that tell us about all of the things we've come to accept as truth or science around the world that has to be wrong in order for that to happen and I think it's a good way to kind of look at it from a different perspective to try to further kind of underline how the problems are when you go into apologetics when we talk about how one apologetic answer kind of creates another problem and this is a good way to illustrate that by saying let's just assume it's right then what else do we now have to change from our daily thoughts to make that fit and there are a lot of things that would have to change I love it all right well Mike you've done a great job and uh you know as as we tried to persuade you before this episode started you've impacted the lives of tens of thousands of people in very very positive ways and uh so we really appreciate it Mike and I know my listeners and viewers will join me in thanking you for all your work so far well like I said I hope that's true um I you know it's it's hard to kind of be able to know how many people are really being helped with this but but I think that hopefully this Series has has done done uh put a bigger Spotlight on it just because I know the website's gotten a lot of hits but it's not anywhere near what this is and so that was the goal was just put it out there um I think early on when people would email me and say man this was done in a way that really helped me a little bit more or differently than some of the other websites that were out there um I I thought well okay that's the way it helped me process it so um if it helps other people do it that's a really cool thing and um it lasts for a while if it's and if I may let me just end by encouraging everyone if they've been helped by Mike and by LDS discussions to drop him an email at LDS discussion uh singular gmail.com sometimes when you're just working out of a bunker at an undisclosed location and you don't get the direct feedback you just don't know the way that you're helping people so if you love Mike if you appreciate Mike feel free to shoot him an email at ldsdiscussion gmail.com and let him know what his work has meant to you and while you're at it you can also email nemothemormon gmail.com but also please subscribe to Nemo the Mormon uh YouTube channel along with subscribing to the Mormon stories podcast YouTube channel because that's how our channels grow that's how we reach more people and that's some good that you can do in the world you can also donate to uh Nemo Nemo's work at UH donorbox.org name of the Mormon Andy can donate to Mormon stories podcast at mormasteries.org clicking on the Donate button become a monthly donor we do pay Mike and Nemo for their work and we would love your support to keep this series alive and to continue to offer more of a story's podcasts to those who need it so uh thanks so much Mike and Nemo you're both the best uh thanks to all our viewers and listeners and everyone who works behind the scenes including neem including Maven and Julia and Gerardo and uh our board of directors and everyone else who makes all this stuff possible we couldn't do it without you um please be good to each other be kind to each other and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon stories podcast and on LDS discussions take care everybody