Pints With Aquinas - Joe Heschmeyer DESTROYS Mormonism | Last Call Ep. 7

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

It's Last Call! Catholic apologist, Joe Heschmeyer, is back to absolutely DESTROY Mormonism (in a nice way) alongside host, Matt Fradd.  Pints: Last Call Ep. 7 - - - 📚Resources Mentioned:  Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis: https://www.amazon.com/Mere-Christianity-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060652926 The Belief of Catholics by Ronald Knox: https://www.amazon.com/Belief-Catholics-Ronald-Knox/dp/1587310066 The Catechism of the Catholic Church: https://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catechism/catechism-of-the-catholic-church - - - Today's Sponsors: Hallow: Deepen your personal relationship with God today. Visit https://hallow.com/MattFradd to get 3 months free. Shopify: Sign up for your $1-per-month trial and start selling today at https://Shopify.com/pints Good Ranchers:  Get $25 off your first order and FREE meat for life when you use code PINTS at https://GoodRanchers.com  - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Look, it's simple. If a guy had more than one wife, he can't be a profit. How many wives did the prophet Jacob have? But someone using their authority as profit to sexually exploit teenage women

is showing a pattern of abuse and dishonesty that is something bigger than plural marriage. So if you're conflating that with, oh, you just think polygamy's bad, I think you missed a critique. Dissued. Gidey, Joe Heschmeyer. How are you? Great. How are you? Could not be better.

I could try, but I would be unsuccessful. Doing fantastic. Happy to hear it. So, producer Maria has several TikToks for us to look at and the topic of the day. See, you've made me really self-conscious about the Mormonism thing. I can say Mormonism, can I know? Yeah, Mormonism is the clearest way to say the thing. LDS?

L-Dogs? Yeah. L-Dogs, yeah. People will not know what that means. No, right. All right, so let's just jump into it. So we'll look at the first TikTok. Joseph Smith, look, it's simple.

If a guy had more than one wife, he can't be a prophet. How many wives did the prophet Jacob have? Well, four, but God was more tolerant of adultery back then. And how many wives did David have? Um, a lot. So why was David only considered an adulterer with Bashiba? Well, God, he cared about some adultery, but not all adultery. And according to scripture, who gave David his wives?

Um, um. Then Nathan said to David, the Lord, the God of Israel, says, I anointed you king of Israel. I gave you your master's house and his wives and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Okay, I get it. You Mormons just want to have more wives. Have you ever read the book of Mormon? Wherefore my brethren, hear me, and hearken unto the word of the Lord. For there shall not any man among you have, save it be one wife. wife, and concubines he shall have none. Okay, I'm confused right now. Maybe it's not as simple as you

think. I full on thought he was going to say, dude, have you even had a wife? Why would he want multiple? I don't know. I misread that. So have you ever heard anybody say he couldn't have been a prophet or it's impossible to be a prophet and have multiple wives? No, I'm not sure this is a real objection I've ever heard. Now, I would be interested if anyone wants to point to the comments, of some critic of Mormonism who said, yeah, this is the reason. But I think that is a misunderstanding of the argument being made against Joseph Smith. What's the argument being made against Joseph Smith? The argument being made against Joseph Smith is that he is secretly practicing plural marriage

while publicly denying that he's practicing plural marriage. And to teenage bills, right? Included? Yeah, exactly. And so right now, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says that he got some kind of secret revelation as far back as 1831. But after this, there was a public denial that they were believing or practicing anything like this. And in the 1835, I believe, an addition of doctrines and covenants, there is Doctrine and Covenants 1.1, which includes an explicit denial that this is being taught.

And then you have Doctrines and Covenants 132 that then announces a new revelation in, I believe, 1843, announcing this new practice of plural marriage, which we now know, historical. 12 years earlier, he was secretly hooking up with women that he was telling them they were married to him and that he was lying about this. I mean, there's no two ways around it. The issue is not just that there was plural marriage or polygamy. The issue is he was using his authority as a prophet to engage in this practice. And Doctors and Covenous 132 is remarkable because there is an explicit section in which what is allegedly God, tells Emma, who bear in mind, when she got married, took the same marriage promises anyone at the time would have taken, which includes an understanding of monogamy,

that she is not allowed to divorce him or she will be damned, because she's found out at this point that he's involved with these other women secretly. This was not something she was okay with or consented to. It's something he was caught doing and then claimed God had given him authorization to do. So you have to believe several things. Number one, if the Church of Jesus, Christ of Latter-day Saints is correct now, that he believed he was being led by God to this as far back as 1831, that you have him publicly saying something to the contrary because it's convenient to not tell the full truth. This is at best, you could maybe say a half-truth. It looks more like just an out-and-out lie. Now, the way I've heard Mormon apologists defend this is, well, nobody else was kind of doing this.

wasn't something being taught as a doctrine, but this is something he privately believed. That is a very neat kind of way of getting around. He was being criticized for this thing that they now admit he was doing. The reason the Navu Legion went in to shut down the local newspaper by force was because it was publicly saying that he was engaged in these sexually immoral practices. That's what the criticism is. It's not just some Old Testament prophets had multiple wives. We can get into the question of whether we would regard Jacob or David as prophets. Certainly there are people who, in an earlier age, were led by God and were engaged in behavior that wasn't completely morally upright. That is not a bar to them being prophets. But someone using their authority as

prophet to sexually exploit teenage women or teenage girls, and then lying about it is showing a pattern of abuse and dishonesty that is something bigger than plural marriage. There is a different So if you're conflating that with, oh, you just think polygamy is bad, I think you missed a critique. Now, I don't know if you saw this recently, it hit the news. There was a pastor with multiple wives. I think we're going to see this, right? More and more and more. In fact, it'll be interesting if polygamy catches on in our society, if the Church of Jesus Christ

of Latter-day Saints will change their opinion yet again on this area. But what I wanted to say is they appeal to polygamy in the Old Testament to say, see, it's fine. often Christians will say, okay, but it wasn't ever kind of command that it was merely permitted. But what he seems to be saying is that, no, no, David was explicitly told to have multiple wives. He didn't say that, but that scripture verse seems to have implied. Yes, it's either Second King's 18 or Second Samuel 18. It escapes me right now. And there's a particular context there where David is being rebuked by Nathan for the situation with Bashiba. and one of the things he's being rebute for is God has given him everything, including the kingdom and including the harem of salt.

That doesn't mean that God wanted him to sleep with all of those women. In fact, prior to that, we had seen that a king is not to have more than one wife. That's actually explicitly in the Old Testament. Yet we know that these kings thought it was important to have multiple lives. There's a whole broader theological point to be made there, where when the Israelites want a king, they're told in no uncertain terms how corrupting a king. is going to be because the danger of kingship is that you start to rely on yourself and your own authority rather than relying on God. And yet when they push for it, God permits him to have a king and even raises up certain men as kings. But we see these men compromising morally and what they viewed at the time was politically expedient or necessary. This isn't depicted as good. So when the harem of Saul is given to David, the point there isn't that God wants him to sleep with all of these women.

is a misunderstanding of what is happening. Rather, this is a symbol of royal authority that is being given to David, a symbol of royal authority that shouldn't have existed in the first place, and that other parts of Scripture are very clear on. And so Nathan's point is that even having all of this, that wasn't enough for David. He goes after Bathsheba as well. Now, where I think there's a quotation, he goes from the book of Mormon, which I believe is from the book of Jacob 2. And if you read Jacob 2, it explicitly said, that David and Solomon, having many wives and concubines, was an abomination. But then when you read Doctrines and Covenants 132, it says that other than Bashiba, all of the wives that were given to David

and Solomon were gifts from the Lord. So unless you believe that God gives abominations, it seems like there's a very clear contradiction there. So again, look, the critique is not, plural marriage could never be taught. Like, you could imagine a situation where God says, tomorrow I want everyone to be polygamist. We would have problems with that. That's not the problem I'm raising today. You can have a situation where polygamy is tolerated because you're worried about other moral faults first.

This is part of the divine pedigal. You don't solve every problem right away. You solve some problems as you go. All right. Is that all right if we move on to the next one? Oh, yeah. Sorry. Oh, we have Jacob again. Let's see what he says.

I look at Christian history. Those people are, they're the reason that I'm a Christian. Yeah. I believe the entire Christian tradition shows that Christianity is true because of the demonstrable fruits that came from the great Christian movement. I just believe when I look at that Christianity, something is missing. And you even see this in the early church history when you have missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints going into England and they begin to teach people who are like, this is it. We've been waiting for this. We've been waiting for this restoration, you know, because they recognize that a reformation was not enough to bring back what is lost.

I find this fascinating in talking with people in Reformed Christianity, where I'm like, look at what we're really offering and what we really are bringing to you. This is not something that's just some out there thing. This is the restoration of the actual authority to act in God's name. because you recognize something went wrong along the way, right? Right, right. Even Protestants will recognize something went wrong. So we're what, talking about the great apostasy in a way? Yeah.

There's also the sort of alluded to the fruits argument. Yes. There's a kind of argument that Mormon apologists will make and have made at least as far back as Talmadge more than 100 years ago, where he'll argue, hey, look, here are all of these Protestants who say there's something that gets corrupted, something that's lost. You even have Protestants in that age that speak explicitly of there being a great apostasy and the church went into a dark age and the church was destroyed from the earth.

If you take those claims seriously, then it stands to reason that a German monk like Luther or a French lawyer like Calvin doesn't have the divine authority to restore a church that Jesus Christ himself found it. That if Jesus founded a church and it failed, a man-made restoration in the sense of the Protestant Reformation won't work. And so there were a lot of restorationist movements in the 19th century. Joseph Smith is one of many people trying to restore. Because at the time, the 19th century frontier was filled with people preaching these contradictory different denominational doctrines. And they obviously couldn't all be right. They could all be wrong. Smith concludes that they're all wrong and that therefore a prophet is needed to restore the true church and that he claims to be that prophet. So at least understand, I think, what the claim is. There's two problems. One, is you have these promises made to the church that seem to preclude any kind of apostasy. Daniel, too, about the kingdom being established that will never be destroyed.

That seems to be clearly talking about the kingdom being built on earth during the time of the Roman Empire. Matthew 16, very famously. The promise in John 14 and John 16 that the Holy Spirit will guide us into the fullness of truth. Jesus' promise in Matthew 28 that he'll be with us always until the end of the age. You've got all these promises that not only is there no clear prophecy of the whole church is going to fall away. There seem to be these clear prophecies that that won't happen, and the church will be led into the fullness of truth. And then you couple that with the good spiritual fruit, that as Rodney Stark points out in his book on the rise of Christianity,

Christianity explodes in growth over these centuries. It doesn't look like a dying church after an apostasy, that there is a visible, organized church that is spreading without any help from the Roman Empire in the first 300 years. And this is a remarkable story that is very difficult to explain if not for God's providential help. And it's hard to harmonize those facts with this idea that something has been lost in the sense that the church has fallen into an apostasy, has lost the keys and has lost the priesthood. And it is shifting into doctrinal just chaos. I'm not sure if you've heard how Peter Crave first got interested in. in Catholicism, but he was a Calvinist at a college, and somebody explained it this way. And again,

he's not talking about the great apostasy, but this would be more of a Protestant understanding, I suppose. He would say, well, yes, Jesus Christ did establish a church singular, and that church was like a great bark sailing across the oceans of time, but after a while, all sorts of pagan and non-biblical barnacles attached themselves to the ship, and it got to the point where the whole thing was about to sink. And so thank God for people like Martin Luther and Calvin, who could come long, scrape the ship clean, and it could set sail again. And so Peter said to him, are you saying then that if I got into a time machine and went back to the first and second centuries, I would feel more at home, more comfortable with Christians and Christian worship

than a Catholic? And his professor said, that's exactly what I'm saying. So Peter went and read the church fathers and became a Catholic. Yeah. One of the things that makes the LDS claim a little different is how early they have to put the great apostasy. So they will put it either in or immediately after the lifetime of the apostles, that the apostles die and they aren't being replaced. So you have to say that the church is breaking down structurally then. There might still be people of good faith. They're not going to deny that. But in terms of a visible structured church headed by apostles, when James dies in the early 40s, he's not replaced. When Peter dies, they understand Peter has a special authority.

When he dies in the mid-60s, he's not replaced. When John dies, or maybe his taken up if you believe that in the year 100, he's not replaced. And so now there's nobody and nobody panics about it. You don't find one writing where they say, we were supposed to have apostles forever and we don't. You have a clear understanding of the exact opposite. They think, yeah, this was supposed to be just for the first century. And when they replace Judas in Acts 1, they're clear that anyone who's going to be one of the 12 has to be someone who accompanied Jesus in his ministry. And Luke 22 is clear that there are 12 saved people who will sit on the thrones in heaven, judging the 12 tribes, that the 12 isn't meant to be a perpetual institution.

There are exactly 12 saints plus Judas who occupy that role. All right. Let's look at the next one. Man, there's a whole lot of Jacob. Now, let's just pause before we play this. Just thanks, Finn. Is this because Jacob is the primary apologist for Mormonism right now? He does a lot. Yeah. Are there others who are... His brother does stuff. And then there's a... What's his name? Hayden, who... I don't remember Hayden's last name. You know so-so. He sat down with Trent.

So there's not a lot of people doing a time. Okay, well, that explains it. All right. Thanks, Finn. This episode is sponsored by Hello. Hello is the number one Catholic prayer and meditation app, which is built to help you find real peace and grow closer to God in the middle of a busy, distracted world.

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premise two, suffering involves a change in emotional state. Premise three, God is a perfect being. Therefore, God never has. Can we pause it as this conclusion finishes Finn? All right, let's just talk about this before we go on to the rest of it. I mean, because the first thing I thought that if perfect beings don't change and growth involves change, then Jesus Christ should never have grown. Is he actually trying to make the argument that Christ didn't suffer on the cross? No, he's trying to make the argument that this disproves.

the impassibility of God. Okay. So he's going to say, yes, Jesus suffered, and this proves that God can suffer. He has emotions and everything else. So divine simplicity must be false. Oh, okay, thank you. The reason I asked that question is I remember

when I was about 16, 17 years old, an LDS co-worker of mine gave me a DVD on the life of Jesus because I had just come to Christ, and so I watched it, and I remember being shocked that Jesus didn't look like he was in pain at all. And I asked him, and he said, well, the Bible never says he was in pain.

But to be clear, that's not an LDS. Yeah, that's also not true. The suffering servant suffers. Right, okay. All right, let's continue. But what if only the human consciousness in Jesus suffered? Does this mean Jesus has two consciousnesses, two minds? But if Jesus was a single person, how could he have two minds?

Think about it. All right. Have you thought about it? I have. So one of the difficulties, and I've talked about this with Jacob before, is what we mean by mind might differ. So it's better to use terms like intellect and will to be just a little more precise, to be a little clearer. And it is obviously possible for one being to have two intellects. This is not a great analogy, but imagine it this way.

There are different ways you know things. You might know the burner is hot. You put your hand on it. You know it in a different kind of experiential way than you knew it before. So you can know things in multiple ways. There's multiple ways of knowing. So there's no logical reason why a single being couldn't have two natures, why a single being couldn't have two intellects. Now, admittedly, this is different than our own experience. But that's not a particularly helpful argument. It's not a particularly strong argument to say, well, that's not how humans work. Well, sure, it's not how humans work. That's not the normal nature of a human being to also be a divine person. Of course. course. This is part of why Jesus is distinct and unique. But like this, being is what you are, and person is who you are, or nature is what you are, and a person is who you are. So a rock, if you say, what is that, it's a rock. If you say, who is that, that's a nonsensical question.

There's one what and zero who's in a rock. But if I say, what is that? Oh, that's a human. Who is that? Well, it's mad. There's one and one. So there's no reason that there's has to be one to one in zero with a rock, one in one of the human, one in three with God. Logically, there's no difficulty with that. Experientially, that's not how we live. We can't imagine that any more than we could imagine what it's like to be an animal or a rock. But that doesn't mean it's logically impossible or some kind of argument against either the Trinity or the dual natures of Christ. All right, let's take a look at this next one.

No, I'm on. Is he okay? Pain meds. Who is this? I'm out of surgery. I guess the Trinity is so clear. Because I'm tripping.

It makes so much more sense now. Maybe I should have saved that for this. A noble God I can understand. Not. I still debunk them. In the day of the week. Restored truth. Out.

There's so much going on here. Is he making fun of the Trinity? Or is he making fun of like 2,000 years of Christians? believing in the doctrine of the Trinity? I mean, obviously, he's wiser than all of them. Yeah. I'm just kidding.

I mean, there is an obvious, youthful hubris to it. Right, right. But let's just say this. The fact that there is something unknowable and hard to grasp about the Trinity is certainly true, and is something that points to the truth of it for a few reasons. Number one, there is this basic paradox that we can't even know our own mind. So, you know, you have this, you've mentioned before, you've been married your wife for years, and she still surprises you

that you don't know everything about her. That we have this experience with other people. We have this experience with ourselves. We do things where we say, why did I do that? And neurologically, the great paradox is this, our minds,

or, excuse me, our brains are too complicated for us to understand. And if they were simple enough for us to understand, they would be too stupid to even understand something as simple as themselves. So if we can't know ourselves,

at the level of brain, at the level of mind, at the level of our soul, we do things, we don't know why we do them. then the idea that we're just going to comprehend the infinite God is as arrogant as just mocking 2,000 years of Christianity because from your hospital bed you think you've got it all figured out. Like that's the basic story.

Like, yes, there is something otherworldly about the nature of God, which of course there is. And even a pagan would have had the humility to realize, well, obviously God isn't just like a slightly bigger and stronger version of myself. that's certainly the biblical depiction of God, that his ways are not like our ways, and they're above them. And so it's not shocking to find, oh yeah,

the triune God is not simple enough in that sense. Like it's not easy enough for me to just wrap my mind around the infinite God. Destroyed. Obviously, when you look into church history, one of the ways you can tell whether or not there was serious disagreement is whether or not people were talking about it, you know, and so you don't see any major disagreement, any disagreement, right, on the Eucharist, for example, until, what was it, the 11th century? A ninth century.

Barangarius of Tewis? That's 11th century, I think. Well, before that, there were, I'm trying to remember who it was. Okay. Either way, sorry. Yeah, no, no problem. But, you know, then you start to see some talk about it, and we could look to other things. My question for you is, was there any early debate about the Trinity?

Because clearly the Christians are talking about Christ being divine, the Holy Spirit, the Father. Yeah, there are debates about whether Christ is divine in the same way the Father is divine, but nobody is arguing for like the Mormon view of the Godhead. There might be some that are closer to the Mormon view, but it's worth, like if you're going to be a Mormon and you're going to say, you know, the Trinitarian Christians got it wrong, you should be able to say, well, here's this other group of people. of Christians who had it right. Or you have to say, this nature of God was apparently simultaneously so easy, everyone can misunderstand it, but also somehow nobody did understand it. And I think

that should give you serious pause of who were the people who believed what Mormons believe about God in the early days of the church. Even if they were the losing party of Nicaea, where are they? Because it isn't Arianism. It's not Gnosticism. It's not any of the early heresies. They believe wrong things about God, but they're not wrong in the same way Mormonism is wrong. Gotcha. All right, let's take a look at the next one. All right, now, before we play this one, I've seen this before. This, I think, is not a Mormon cartoon. It is an anti-Mormon cartoon from the 1980s.

I believe it's called The Godmakers. Okay. Well, let's watch it and we'll talk about it after. Thus, Lucifer became the devil and his followers, the demons. Those who remained neutral in the battle were cursed to be born with black skin. This is the Mormon explanation for the devil. Negro race, the spirits that fought most valiantly against Lucifer would be born into Mormon families on planet Earth. These would be the lighter-skinned people, or white and delightsome, as the Book of Mormon describes them. Early Mormon prophets taught that Elohim and one of his

goddess wives came to Earth as Adam and Eve to start the human race. Thousands of years later, Elohim in human form once again journeyed to earth from the star base colom, this time to have sex with the Virgin Mary in order to provide Jesus with a physical body. After Jesus Christ grew to manhood, he took at least three wives, Mary, Martha, and Mary Magdalene. Through these wives, the Mormon Jesus, for whom Joseph Smith claimed direct descent, supposedly fathered a number of children before he was crucified. According to the book of Mormon, after his resurrection, Jesus came to the Americas to preach to the Indians,

who the Mormons believe are really Israelites. Okay. Please tell me none of that is true. Well, I mean, in one sense, none of that is true. Please tell me those were never Mormon doctrines. It depends on some of those. mean by doctrines. So in terms of black skin being a curse from God that is in the book of Mormon, and this is until 1978, a reason why anyone with even a drop of black blood was not allowed

into the priesthood. And it's only when they start to spread the Church of Jesus Christ for Latter-day Saints in Brazil where it's very hard to find someone who had no admixture of at least a little bit of black blood, that they suddenly receive a new revelation that says, actually, that doesn't apply anymore. And so you can read that as official declaration. too. But you would have to, like, to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ for Latter-day Saints, you would seemingly have to believe that this, like, God had the same views on race that Americans in the 19th century had on race. Because these sound much closer to the 19th century Americans who were talking about the curse of ham and the curse of Cain as the reason there

were different races. And all of this has aged terribly, is now completely discredited among all but the most fringe people alive today. Now, I'm sure the LDS might see this as sort of propaganda against them, but do you think they were trying to be accurate? And apart from the blacks not being allowed into the priesthood because it was a curse, what about the other stuff? I really do not want to talk about the Blessed Virgin Mary in the way they just did because it makes me sick. Yeah.

But is that what they taught at any point? There were prophets who spoke and seemed to insinuate that the conception of Jesus was not done in a supernatural way. Insinuate? Well, Brigham Young talks about how Jesus was conceived by the Father, not by the Holy Spirit. Well, that in itself doesn't seem like a carnal union. But in context, he seems to be saying there's a carnal union, and it wasn't just divine overshadowing that Luke wants about in Luke 1. And so you have things like this. Now, I think to steal men, the Mormon response, they would say, this is full of half-truths and things that maybe somebody said one thing, but they're presenting as official doctrine and it's not official doctrine.

That might be true. And I will defer to Mormons for which things they would say were officially taught as doctrine, which ones are at a lower level of authority. I think that kind of misses the point of the problem, that these are grotesque blasphemies being taught by LDS prophets. that should be a reason to question the validity of their status as prophets. Even if you say they didn't bind anyone else to hold it, if they believe these abominable things about God, about Mary, about Jesus, like where do you draw the line and just say, like, okay, a true prophet of God wouldn't be making these kind of false claims because they're just incompatible with having a knowledge of God.

What else was taught in that? Oh, there was this star-based co-op things that, you know, calling it a star base. say it's loaning the deck. But you do have these things where it also the presence of American Indians being Israelites. That is certainly something that the LDS believe, and it's certainly something that genetics has disproven. Like they are not descended from. Yeah, lay that out again. This is pretty wild. Yeah. So 19th century literature talks about how some of the lost tribes of Israel came to the Americas. Now, this gets the lost tribes of Israel wrong in the first place, but the 10 northern tribes, and they are destroyed with the conquest of Samaria. And so there's all of this kind of

apocryphal literature at the time imagining what happened to these lost tribes. And so one of the views is that some of these Israelites had fled and had gone to the new world to the Americas, because they're fun. At the same time, you have like cowboy and Indian stories and everything else. The American frontier is ripe with kind of imagination. And Joseph Smith, his mother talks, but how much he liked to tell stories about cowboys and Indians, that kind of stuff. So he liked to imagine this sort of thing and then suddenly just has a revelation like, oh yeah, that thing you dreamt up is totally true, and that's exactly how it happened. And it looks suspiciously like several other works at the time.

So we know genetically it's false. We have a better understanding of where the American Indians come from now, and we know about the crossing of the Bering Strait. We know about all, you know, you can do genetic tracing and all of this stuff now. the core claims of how you get these different tribes like the Nephites in the new world, we now know these just to be false, indefensibly false. So I don't know how one can hear all of that. Those aren't like morally problematic claims.

They're just the core claims of the Book of Mormon are wrong about why these tribes are here in the first place. These tribes didn't exist. And the tribes that did exist were not Israelites. Finn, do we have any more or is that the last video? Oh, we've got another one here. As America celebrates 250 years this year, Good Ranchers is honoring the legacy of American ranchers, the hardworking people who help build and feed this country day in and day out, and they take that seriously.

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That part of Jesus is material, which causes some issues, because if God is immaterial and Jesus is God, then what do you do with Jesus' body? Right, Jesus is fully God today, right? Yes. And is God material or immaterial? All right, so you correct me if I'm wrong, but what I think is, trying to do here is respond to the objection to the claim by the LDS that the father has a body by saying, look, you basically believe the same thing. You don't have a problem with Jesus having

a body, Jesus is God, so it's really not that weird. Is that what he's saying? I'm not 100% sure what he's trying to do. There's certainly no contradiction between saying Jesus, in as much as he is God, is immaterial, and in as much as he is man, is embodied. So why can't the Mormons say the same thing about the Father, Heavenly Father? Well, because in this case, Jesus creates, or the whole cosmos is brought into being through Jesus, as we read about in the New Testament. Jesus then enters into his own creation and takes a body which he did not have before. In his divinity, remains unchanged, but something is united to his divinity, a full human nature.

That's a change in one sense, not in his divinity, but a change in the order of the created reality. there's no reason logically God the Father couldn't have done the same thing if he wanted to go get a body he could have done that he could have become incarnate Aquinas makes this argument as Sumer not the father specifically but different members of the Trinity or even the second person

of the blessing, maybe not the second person but certainly one of the members of the Trinity could become incarnate yeah the second person in the Trinity did become incarnate yeah but I mean again oh I see I see I wasn't sure if that's what Aquinas says but certainly makes the claim that the father could have become incarnate of it right the Holy Spirit could have taken on the body as well

The argument is not that it's impossible for there to be an incarnation or a hypostatic union. The argument is, if you're saying God was embodied on another planet, this raises all sorts of theological and historical questions. Like, does he have human parents? Does he have his own God? Those are the issues. It's not a question of whether you could be fully God and fully man at the same time. That should be an area that certainly a Christian wouldn't object.

to it. Destroyed. Mm-hmm. All right, let's wrap this up. I think it's really important that Catholics, at least some of them who are watching right now, maybe dedicate their life to responding to Mormon claims, especially because in our interview we were talking about the fact that they're so amorphous. And so it's quite difficult to understand what the LDS is saying.

I was always of the opinion that if you go back to the source, sure, you're not. that those claims by early prophets were demonstrably false, that that would be enough. But as we talked about, they're perfectly willing to say nobody's infallible and the scriptures aren't inerrant, which kind of makes it very difficult to argue. So I'd love you to talk about that, but I'd also love to get your advice. So what would your advice be to people who are doing, maybe online apologetics or they're engaging with their Mormon friends? What should they be thinking about how should they approach these interactions? I think the first thing is to present the truth in love. Now, I've tried to do that. I may have gotten things wrong even in the course of this.

Anytime you're trying to critique anyone else's belief system at all, the first danger is, am I understanding the belief system well enough? And as you've said, that's very tricky to do with Mormonism. It's very tricky to do with Mormonism for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it's evolving and there can be new revelation at the drop of a hat. I mean, there isn't often, but there can be. and people can have radically different understandings of these same doctrines. So making sure you understand what the other person is saying is, I think, a very good first step, and approaching them with the spirit of charity. You want the best for them.

You're not there to make fun of Mormonism. You're not there to make fun of these beliefs that have been the guiding principles of their life. You're there to show that, like, God, the God they're trying to follow, actually want something more for them, and that this is very good news. And if you do it with that spirit of charity and love for them, I hope that's what comes through. Now, to Mormons who are watching, I would say, number one, be patient with the fact that non-Mormons trying to understand Mormonism are going to struggle and we're going to make mistakes. We're going to mispronounce words.

We're going to get details wrong. All of that's going to be true. And two, I would say don't get caught up in the, was it technically the highest level of official doctrine or not? If you get to a place where you can say, yes, many of our presidents, taught things that were blasphemous were false for idolatry, the Adam God doctrine, these damnable kind of errors. Take that and read the writing on the wall and say, would God want you in a situation where the people ostensibly led by him, the presidents, the people who are allegedly prophets, are teaching damnable error, even in a slightly less than binding capacity? Or does

he want something more for you? Like if you believe in the goodness of God, there is something better. Yeah, that's what was going to be my next question. No doubt we'll have many members of the LDS community watching these videos. What's your advice to someone who's sort of maybe nervous or on the fence or isn't sure what to do right now if they're beginning to think that LDS is false? I would say don't be afraid of the truth. John Paul II in Fidelis at Rastio talks about faith and reason is the two wings upon which the human spirit rises. You will find people who pit faith against reason, who put faith against reason, who put. faith against philosophy. This is contrary to the goodness of God. God gave you a working brain. He gave you a mind, he gave you an intellect to know the truth, and there's nothing to run from.

And if you find that the religious tradition which you were raised is false, please be patient enough to realize this does not mean that God is false. That doesn't even mean that religion is false. The fact that one person, you know, lies to you doesn't mean, all men are bad or all women are bad. Similarly, the fact that one religion is false doesn't mean that Christianity itself is false. And I know that can be a tall order. If people have had an experience with a very institutional religion

and they come away feeling like they were deceived and lied to, then they often want to give up on the whole thing. And that is unfortunately the case of many ex-mormons. And I would say give historic Christianity a chance and listen to the claims that maybe you didn't grow up understanding and maybe feel very alien to you and try to listen as much as you can with an open heart and see if there isn't something that has more integrity

that stands up more to the evaluation of both faith and reason. Is there one book you might recommend somebody read? Unfortunately, there's not a single great book that I know. I know the work of a lot of people that have been doing very good work. I keep trying to push Isaac Hess to write a book since he's got that background. But I don't know of any one book that I would say just nails everything, partly because there are a lot of moving parts. There are a lot of things that seem to be changing.

So maybe a better book would be something in favor of historic Christianity. So, you know, read C.S. Louis' Mere Christianity. Read Ronald Knox's The Belief of Catholics. Read the catechism of the Catholic Church and try to understand, at the same level you'd want someone to understand Mormonism, if you're coming from a Mormon perspective, try to understand Trinitarian Christianity, where you're not just like, totally debunked it.

Think about the fact that people smarter than you, wiser than you, maybe holier than you, have believed in this stuff and have lived by it. And it's probably not because it's some easily debunked myth. See what they saw in it and see if that doesn't change your perspective. Joe Heschmaier. Thanks for being on the show. My pleasure.