Within Reason - #98 Jacob Hansen - A Mormon Explains Mormonism

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Jacob Hansen is a Mormon YouTuber at the channel Thoughtful Faith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jacob Hansen, welcome to the show. Hi, Alex, thanks for having me. Are Mormons Christian? Yes, but it's going to depend on your definition of Christian. So that's a whole long topic to get into. But as a preface, I thought that most people here probably don't, well, they probably have two characteristics. One is they're probably going Alex Mormonism.

Like, really? you know, a lot of people think of us kind of as a joke. But I also think that if people were pressed, those same people, that they probably would admit that they don't know that much about us, just kind of what they've heard online, they saw the Book of Mormon musical and heard their pastor say that we all get to own our own planets. And, you know, that's kind of as far as a lot of people go with it.

Yeah, that's when I started getting interested when I heard about the planets. That sounded pretty good to me. It's a very materialistic kind of religion, which is, you know, great for a materialist. I think, yeah, obviously, Mormonism is one of the most mocked religions in the world. And the thing that's been interesting to me is that, I mean, we met on the Jubilee 25 surrounded thing. And I remember at the end, I had to choose somebody to speak to, and I was like, I'll speak to this guy. He seemed like he knew what he was talking about. And you said you were an LDS member.

And I remember at the time kind of thinking like, man, that's frustrating because it's really interesting to talk to an LDS member. But that episode, I knew that it was controversial as to whether Mormons kind of count as Christian. And so it was a little bit like, man, is that going to annoy people? Is it going to feel like we've sort of missed an opportunity for what the video is supposed to be? But I'm glad we did talk because, you know, we sort of all went out. I like to say that I took all 25 of you out for a drink afterwards. but I'm not sure that actually everybody came. So it was probably more like 20 or so.

And we were talking, you were one of the last people there, like people were sort of filing away. And we started talking about Mormonism. And it should have become clear to at the time that I just didn't know anything about this religion, you know, because you're having some debate with one of the other guys, like some discussion, right? And I'm hearing about how Joseph Smith had his head in a hat and that he didn't even read the golden plates. and I'm hearing about the extermination order where like, you know, Mormons are like killed on site by the government or something. And I'm hearing all this stuff.

I'm hearing that Joseph Smith is the first U.S. presidential candidate to be assassinated. And I'm just thinking to myself, if anything, this is an extraordinary like history of a religion that I just became instantly fascinated with. And I've spoken about it a lot on my channel since. And I brought it up in debates and stuff. And, you know, it's a bit unfortunate because I think. I think I've kind of made a bit of a joke about it, so I didn't mean to offend any of all the listeners. But, you know, when I'm asked, you know, somebody, somebody asked me recently what denomination of Christian I would be if I would, if I had to choose one. And I said Mormonism,

just to kind of, just kind of to make a joke, kind of to annoy him a little bit. But I did notice that Mormon Twitter seemed to, seem to take that in their stride. And I saw it sort of reposted quite a fair bit. So I'm here to say, ladies and gentlemen, that no, I am, I am not a Mormon. I do like pointing out that if there is any kind of similarity and apologetic that you can make towards Mormonism and Christianity, Christians who think Mormonism is stupid are going to be troubled by that. Because if you point out that there might be sort of similar lines of reasoning you can use to establish Mormonism as you can for Christianity. The Christian will have to take Mormonism more seriously. But it also works for the atheist to therefore take Christianity less seriously, if you know what I mean.

So that's kind of the project that I'm engaged in. Yes. And I would say that there's a lot of double standards when it comes to Latter-day Saints. And just so everyone knows, like if I use the word Latter-day Saints, that's what we call ourselves. Mormon is sort of a nickname. And Mormonism will refer to as the restored gospel. So if I use that terminology, just so you guys know kind of what it is. But you're absolutely right in the sense of people talk about us a lot, but very few people actually talk to us. And I wanted to kind of start this. by saying how we approach this is like how do you approach Mormonism is a big part of the whole discussion kind of for an atheist I think I think you're taking kind of the right approach sort of a sociological curiosity about it for example there's some things that people may not realize they don't realize that the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints is arguably the fastest growing Christian group in the past 200 years there are more latter day saints right now in the world, then there are Jews. Our growth rate in the first 200 years

is about 10 times that of the Christian movement's first 200 years. Now, I'm interested in that because I know that Rodney Stark famously, the sociologist of religion, posited that the growth rate was about the same. You're saying 10 times. So I actually, I looked this up. They said that after about 200 years after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that there were about between, one to two million Christians. That's the research I've done. If people can find out that it's different, you can look that up. We have 17 million. Yeah. So at any rate, it's certainly the case that there's an impressive rate of growth compared to Christianity, even if you take that lower bound. Now, I pointed this out in a recent video of mine, and a lot of people said, well,

the thing is, Alex, of course, you know, Mormonism can grow at a similar rate, but that's because Christians were being persecuted. Christians were being oppressed by the Roman Empire. You don't understand what it's like for these people to risk their lives, risk crucifixion under the Roman Empire in order to still be Christians. And yet it remained one of, like, it kept the same kind of growth rate. It still grew really quickly. Whereas Mormonism, like, you know, that that grew in modern day liberal secular America, right? And people don't know the history then of our people if they think that. Because the Latter-day Saints were persecuted basically right from the start. And I want to get into that part

of sort of the story of that persecution and what happened as we go along here. But there's one other thing I wanted to point out just sociologically as an atheist looks at this. Like a lot of Christians will say, you know, Jordan Peterson or others, like, you know, they point out these really positive effects that Christianity has had on the world. And that's one of the reasons they grant it credibility. Well, people should ask the question, you know, what is the social effect that this Mormonism has on people and the communities where they live? There's a renowned scholar, his name's Ram Khan, Kanan, I think is how you pronounce it,

from the University of Pennsylvania. He did a study on Latter-day Saints and on kind of their pro-social behavior. And a lot of times people, you know, it's in a lot of academic research, people couch their language. They're kind of careful in what they say. This is what he said in the summary. He said, overall, we found that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are the most pro-social members of American society. Regardless of where they live, they are very generous with their time and money through a theology of obedience and sacrifice and strong commitment to tithing and service. Latter-day Saints are modeled citizens. Now, I'm not here to say any of this proves that

it's true. I'm just saying that from an atheist perspective, when you look at this, if religion is just useful fiction, well, what if Mormonism is wildly useful in the lives of people? Yeah, I think that is interesting because there are multiple questions here, which are the truth claims, the theology, the history, and also just the societal effect, right? I don't think there are many people out there saying that Mormonism is a force for evil in the world to the same extent that, you know, Wahhabi Islam is, right? I know that there are, there are former Muslims who've had troubles with the church, they've had disputes and arguments. I don't really know about the culture of things like apostasy within Mormonism. And I hope you don't mind if I use

the word Mormonism. I know that the organization. Yeah, no, we're talking about it sociologically and stuff, so that's fine. It's sort of flip back and forth, right? Like leaders of the church have sort of said, it's okay to say Mormon. And then it's like, no, actually, it's not okay to say Mormon because we need to use the right terminology. So I'll try my best here. But of course, I mean, you mentioned a strong commitment to tithing, for example. It isn't tithing a requirement of the LDS church? No, it's not a requirement.

You can be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and not pay tithing. Now, with that in mind, for access to the temple, there are requirements that a person must be living in certain ways to qualify for certain. ordinances. If you think about it, you know, again, you have to remember fundamentally we are Christians in the sense that we are following the Lord Jesus Christ of the New Testament. And he expected his followers to be willing to consecrate everything to the building of his kingdom. And so, yes, there is, if a person wants to participate in temple ordinances, one of the things, they're expected to live certain standards of the faith. And paying tithing is one of those standards of the faith. So yes, it is, it is in a sense, if a person wishes to be a full

disciple of Jesus Christ, they should be willing to tithe. And that's not, that is not a Mormon thing. That's a Christian thing. Yeah, what, what are they expected to pay? Well, a tithe is based on the idea of a tenth. So it's a tenth of your income. Oh, so it is actually, it's like an etymologically, that's interesting. You know, I hadn't even clocked. to that before the tie this 10th. So it is a 10th. It's not, it's, I suppose that the word tithe is used these days sometimes to refer to other percentages that are determined. But, but this is really a 10th. Yes. So a 10th. And interesting. I never realized that before, that tithe 10th. Yeah, fair enough. It's, it's funny that one thing with, you know,

you kind of say nobody thinks like Mormons are like evil. Well, I would, I would beg to differ. If you meet a lot of Christian apologists, they will very much say that Mormonism is certainly an evil in the world. And so while an atheist can approach, you know, Mormonism from sort of this sociological perspective, for a Christian, there's a whole other question that you have to ask. You know, a Christian can't just reject these claims to the miraculous that we make because they're open to the idea of the miraculous happening. And they have to ask the question, you know, what does Jesus? think of these latter-day saints and the answer that we get is that well you're going to hell because you're not Christians and if you're not a Christian well then you can't be saved

and for those who sort of reject that idea and say no latter-day saints can be saved that means it being a latter-day saint is a live option like it's it's just kind of like a matter of preference right like you like being a presbyterian I like being a latter-day saint and And we all go ahead. Or at least to the extent that somebody could be like a, I mean, somebody could be a universalist. They could think that I'm going to happen, even though I don't believe in any of this. And I suppose that would encompass, encompass LDS members. Do you say LDS members or do you call yourself like LDSs, like LSDs?

Like Latter-day Saints. So LDS is. I'll just say LDS or I'll say Latter-day Saints or members of the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-States. Alex, if you call me a Mormon or you call us Mormons, I, like, I'm not going to, like, I'm fine. Don't worry about it. It's probably not the most offensive thing that someone said about you on the internet. Oh, no. I've... Give me some grace.

We'll get back to Jacob in just a moment, but first, do you trust the news? I don't. And a lot of that has got to do with the way that media bias inevitably seeps into reporting. We can never get rid of bias, of course, but wouldn't it be great if there were a way for us as consumers of news to navigate this media landscape, objectively comparing the way that different sources are reporting on the same story? Well, that is exactly what today's sponsor, Ground News, allows you to do. Ground News aggregates thousands of local and international news outlets all in one place so you can compare reporting across the political spectrum. Try it out for yourself by going to ground.com news forward slash Alex O.C. Take a look at this story about the Church of England saying that non-alcoholic wine and gluten-free bread cannot be used for Holy Communion. Looking at the bias distribution, I can see that most of the sources reporting on this story are right-leaning, with only 29% of them leaning to the left.

This means that if you only tend to read left-leaning news, you could have missed this story altogether. And Ground News also has a feature called My News Bias, which is a personal dashboard, giving you a detailed look at the news that you're reading. It shows you which sources you check out the most. Their biases, who owns them, and which geographic regions the stories are related to. Nowhere is doing news aggregation quite like Ground News. Try it out for yourself by going to ground.news forward slash Alex OC, or by scanning the QR code that's on your screen. use my link to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage plan. With that said, back to Jacob.

I did see Matt Frat of Pints of Aquinas. You had a debate with Trent Horn about Mormonism on Pints for the Quineas. I've been on that show too. Matt does quite well as a podcaster. I think his channel's growing. He's a competent interviewer. I did see him say that if he was walking down the street and he saw a book of Mormon in one of those like community-levels.

libraries, you know, like the way you can sort of take a book and leave a book, that he would take it out and throw it in the trash. And sort of also defended it. He did, yeah, so he was defending the idea of burning books of Mormon and that if he saw one in the, in the community library, he thinks it's okay to take it out and throw it in the trash. And the reason I bring that up is because, I mean, that was, that was in a way offensive to me, just as somebody who is naturally shaken by the thought of burning, at least most books. I was asked in a Q&A recently whether it's ever okay to burn books, and if we're going to be pedantic, trivially, yeah, if there was a book that contained the nuclear codes or something like that, you know, fine.

But in this case, I was a little bit disturbed, and the reason for this is because these Christians see it as false doctrine. They see it as misleading people to have a wrong view of Christ. So when you say that people think that Christians think Mormons are, you know, dangerous, do they just mean in terms of the state of your eternal soul? So like the doctrines that you believe are leading you to hell, or do they actually believe that there are a force for evil in the world? Like they do evil things that make people's lives worse in the world. I would say it's more theological for sure. But it also, their idea is that if you don't have a proper theology, then you go to hell. Like you can be a wonderful Latter-day saint who not only who professes faith in Jesus Christ.

Like I will tell people right now, I have placed my faith entire. in the Lord Jesus Christ is my Savior, he is my Savior and my Redeemer. But they say, yeah, but you have the wrong, you're worshiping the wrong Jesus because I reject the Trinitarian formulation of God. That's why the Catholic Church will recognize, for example, the baptisms done by Protestants, but they won't recognize Latter-day Saint Baptisms, even though we literally baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. But because we mean something differently about the ontological status of those three persons,

well, that's enough to say it doesn't count. And so that's, see, where we speak, though, and so for a lot of people, for an atheist, we're just sort of a sociological phenomena that's interesting to look at. But for a Christian, they have to consider a lot of other factors here. You know, is this a live option?

C.S. Lewis, for example, he has this wonderful analogy of mere Christianity being like this house. and he says that in this house you don't live in the halls where you live in one of the rooms and one of the denominations he said I have a quote here

he says it is in the rooms not the hall that there are fires and chairs and meals the hall is a place to wait in a place from which to try the various doors not the place to live in and so for somebody like Ayan Hersi Ali who finds herself as sort of a mere Christian

there's this question you know are you Catholic are you Protestant? Are you Orthodox are you orthodox and but what if you're like not satisfied with any of those options i think this is where the restored gospel really has something to say that is really fascinating to people and and a lot of people they jump right to sort of the joseph smith story and i always tell people look the joseph smith story which we'll get into it's the second half of the play it's act two and if you don't understand what happened in Act 1, Act 2 will make no sense, right?

And so the first part of this story starts long before Joseph, and it's really when you find out what we say in this first part, this is really what fires up sort of the creedal Christian tradition, right? And so if you want, we can kind of start going into some of that. Which I do love to do, yes. I mean, I think we, there's a lot I want to cover, and I want people to bear in mind that if they're listening to this, I want to give you space to sort of talk about what Mormons believe. I want to get some theological ideas. I want people to understand what Mormonism actually is. Because even now, after listening to us talk for 15 minutes, they might be like, I still don't know what this is, what makes it different.

I want to give you the space to do that. We are going to discuss some criticisms. We're going to talk about the Book of Abraham. We're going to talk about black people in being allowed into the temple. We're going to talk about polygamy. We're going to talk about these things. but I'm not going to, you know, come out of the box with those things. So, and of course you need to have some understanding about what Mormonism is for that to make any sense.

So if you think it's most appropriate to start with the story of Mormon, then we can do that. Yes. I think that's probably the best way to start with this. So the first part is to understand, there's a question that I like that has. This goes way before Joseph Smith. And that is, why does the God of Aristotle sound exactly like the God that emerged in the creedal tradition okay aristotle's god is this unmoved mover pure actuality being itself it you know to quote our friend dr craig he's timeless spaceless immaterial yeah right without passions without

parts without change now if you were to just go read the bible is that what you'd come up with like when you read the bible straight up god is no passion Like the Old Testament, God, no passions, really. Christ rises from the dead with a physical body. How do you reconcile that with this idea of an immaterial God? And so what a lot of people don't realize was that this is the problem, in my opinion, with the creedal tradition. They start by saying, well, what are we talking about? We're talking about God.

Well, what is God? Well, God is that which no greater can be conceived. In other words, they aren't going to Jesus and saying, what is God? They're saying they're using a philosophical frame that goes back to the Greeks of perfect being theology, and they're saying this is what we mean by God, and then they're trying to reason back to, like, basically apply that lens to the Bible as the lens of interpretation, right? So, one of the... So they're not looking at scripture for their basis of their idea of God, but rather using the light of knowledge. natural reason, essentially.

Absolutely. So, and, and what it is, is, and then their God, this is what biblical scholarship is revealing more and more, that the conception of God and things like the Old Testament, it wasn't even hard monotheism. Like, in the creation account, they're talking about man has become as one of us. Wait, what? Now, a plain reading of the text, you're going to say there are some sort of divine beings involved here, and there's a counsel of gods. There's all sorts of things that when you look at the biblical scholarship, you realize that this hard abstract monotheism is a later creation. And even worse than that, it doesn't jive with the embodied resurrected Jesus. I want people to know as well that

these are ideas that are not strictly speaking Mormon. I know you haven't claimed that that's the case, but the idea of monotheism developing over the course of the history of Judaism and not being present from the start. I did an episode with Dr. Justin Sledge from esoterica on the origins of Yahweh as a god. And we talked about this, where monotheism came from. And so I just want people to be aware that this isn't just like some weird Mormon interpretation of the Bible. This is something that people do say. For instance, the thou shalt have no other gods before me. A lot of people interpret that to not be monotheistic, but he no theistic. And he Hinotheism is the view that there are lots of gods, but only one of them should be worshipped,

which is a kind of de facto monotheism, but is not quite the same thing. And yes, you've mentioned the Council of Gods, mentioned in famously in the Book of Job, or the Divine Council in the Book of Job, and God has a council in the Psalms as well, where he refers to other people as gods. It's all a little bit strange. So that stuff really is in there, and that's not just a Mormon thing. Yeah. And what people don't realize is that the Christians of the first century and even the Jews had been deeply Hellinized in their intellectual traditions. And so Jesus comes in and he actually is a big problem because he rises with a body. And this really matters because for the next few centuries you have what are known as the great Christological debates of the early church where everyone is trying to figure out. what are we to make of Jesus?

Now, there's a funny thing, Alex, you and I in the Jubilee debate, one of the topics we debated is Jesus never claimed to be God. Now here's a little funny thing about that. There's a sense in which it depends on what you meant by God. If you are meaning the abstract conception of the hard monotheistic creedal tradition, I would say, yeah, Jesus didn't ever claim to be that.

He did claim to be a divine being. And so that was kind of, I thought that was kind of funny. But it's important to remember that there's this conflict. It's the same problem in a sense that we have today. There's this sort of abstract notion of God that someone like Jordan Peterson will talk about, you know, the highest value. And he's talking in platonic ideas, right? Very Greek in the way he's thinking about it. But then you're over there going, yeah, but did Jesus actually rise with a physical body out of that tune?

Right? that is the essence of the same debate that was going on in the early church. And so being Hellenized sort of people in the Greek world, they began to approach this debate using a Greek sort of

lens of actuality, potentiality, impassibility, all this kind of stuff. And this is totally foreign to like the world of Jesus and what he taught. You know, you go to the sermon on

the mount and it's it's this law of conduct it doesn't it assumes beliefs it doesn't formulate them um it's it belongs to the ethical not this sort of speculative side of theological stuff one one is a um one is you know something you'd hear amongst jewish peasants the other is you know from the world of greek philosophers um and in the early church there was no central Well, originally there was an adjudicating authority, right? Like when they had the question about circumcision, well, there was a central authority in the apostles like Peter who kind of settled the question.

But in the years following the death of the apostles, there were kind of these different local leader groups, and there were different ideas and different Christian traditions. And I know that you are familiar with that as you've studied some of early Christian history. Like, it is not a super, like, there was, one group that was just, this is the official church. It was a much more diverse movement. Yeah, people will dispute the extent to which that is the case. I, the, the fascinating thing

with the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels in the Narcomadi Library was this indication that the early Christian movement was a lot more, there was a lot more variance. I mean, we knew that these ideas existed, of course, but we didn't have the actual texts themselves. And it sort of became increasingly clear. I think Elaine Pagels, who have had on the show, had a lot to do with this, her book, The Gnostic Gospels in the 70s, sort of proposed this idea that it's not a homogenous early Christian community, but like this fledgling Jesus movement that has lots of different strands. The interesting thing about, I think you're right that the philosophy of religion is quite divorced from the Bible in the sense that if you ask a biblical scholar,

what is contingency. They might have no idea and they have no need to know either. But I think that the philosopher will be listening to this and saying that's all very well and good, but philosophy is more fundamental, right? Like if something by the light of reason just leads you into a conclusion, like that there must be a unified first cause that is spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. If that is just logically true, no matter what, then you have your Christian revelation, you have to make the Christian revelation fit the more foundational philosophical certainty rather than abandoning the philosophical certainty for what is essentially your interpretation of a text, right? So people will think that you're sort of doing it the wrong

way around, in other words. Yeah, and that is exactly the argument of sort of the early leaders and early philosophers and my whole point though is is just to recognize that that's what they're doing they're not going through the text of the bible and saying this is what the bible obviously says they're starting with a preconception for what god is arrived through purely through reason rather than through revelation um and so this is a big deal to latter day saints um in fact from the very beginning there's a um and i think that they come up i think perfect being theology leads you to absolute incoherence

and it's not, it's incompatible with the Bible. One of our early church leaders, I think he summed it up really well. He was talking about these different theories about God and the creeds and he says that the language amongst these theories runs like this. He says there is only one and true, one living

and true God without body, parts, or passions consisting of three persons. And he goes on to say this. He says, it's painful to the human mind to be compelled to admit that such wonderful, inconsistencies of language or ideas have ever found place in any human creed, yet so it is. It is but another way of saying there is a god who does not exist, a god who is composed of non-entity, who is the negative of all existence, who occupies no space exists in no time, who is composed

of no substance known or unknown, and who has no powers or properties in common with anything or being known to exist. Such a god could never be seen, heard, or felt, by any being in the universe. And that last line, I think he's sort of paying homage to the interaction problem, right? If this God is totally other than the created order,

how does he interact with the created order in any way? So these are ideas that for Latter-day Saints, we look at this and we go, something happened here. And what it really comes down to historically is that there was no central authority.

An analogy I like to use as like a mirror that fell and broke. And the Gnostics, for example, I think they picked up part of the mirror. They had something there. They're missing a ton, and I would say that the Gnostics are wrong,

but they had something. And the creedal tradition that emerged, I would say was actually probably the biggest piece of the mirror. I don't want to go too hard against the creedal tradition because I actually believe that they are kind of got,

you know, they got the biggest piece. But without this central sort of adjudicating authority, it's all kind of a mess until Constantine adopts this divided movement as the official religion of the Roman Empire and so now as the official religion

you have to have an official like what do we believe what is within the bounds of orthodoxy and what is outside the bounds of orthodoxy this is where the creeds come from they begin centuries after Jesus and they begin as a orthodoxy test. Now, there were creeds that they talk about that were before,

but Latter-day Saints don't really have problems with, you know, like the Apostles' Creed that says, you know, Jesus died and resurrected. It's more the later creeds that begin to change this notion about the identity of who God is, right? Just a point of pedantry, I think, because this is said a lot. I think it is Constantine who made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire,

but Theodosius, who 10 years later made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. Okay. And that... Not that matters here, but to be honest with you, it saves that line of critical commentary. You know what I mean? You're right. And if I make little slip-ups, just know people, like, I'm doing my best here, and I may misspeak occasional little things. It's just one of those huge, like, factoids, like, that gets said all the time.

Because he made it legal, I think it's like... I mean, Richard Dawkins has it in his book, you know, in Outer Gras. growing God. And it's, it's just seems to have become true, I suppose. But, but, but now I think that's, that's the case. Speaking of things becoming true, here's what's interesting, just historically speaking. The great Christological debates were never resolved. Instead, a particular take on the Christological debates was enforced. In other words, if you were outside of the orthodoxy of the official church of the Roman Empire, the official religion, then you were a heretic not just in a in a vague sense like you were against the official church and this creedal tradition

it didn't really spread because it just like made so much sense it wasn't like you know they went to people were like oh hypostatic union there's like that makes total sense like trinity like perfect the reason that it spread was because it was the official religion of governments that for 1500 years had adopted this sort of creedal tradition as their official like orthodoxy and then as they expand well this is our religion right and so for essentially for 15 hundred years this creedal tradition spreads around the world and is enforced through the state and it's funny because to this day it's still not enforced through argument it's enforced through sort of social pressure for example you're on ruslan's podcast and as soon as you mention latter day saints what's the first thing

he says. He says they're not Christian. Okay. What he's doing is he's saying they, why aren't we Christian? You want to know why he say we're not Christian? It's not because we don't accept the New Testament or believe that Jesus rose from the dead. It's because we don't accept the Trinitarian formulation of God, which is a, which is demonstrably a formulation that came through the creeds centuries after Christ. I'm sure if, I think if Ruslan were asked that and I'm sure he's setting up a live stream as we speak to respond. I'm perfectly happy to talk with him about this, by the way. He might say, like, yeah, but it's not just like, you know, well, I'm a Trinitarian and I've

decided that and that means you don't count. But rather, I have good reasons to think that Christianity requires the Trinity, that you have to believe in the Trinity in order to be a Christian. And so when I say that you're not a Christian because you don't believe in the Trinity, it's a shorthand for saying you're not a Christian because you don't align with what I consider to be fundamental to Christianity. for good philosophical reasons, not just because it's decided by some ancient doctrine. And I would, I, for any Christians watching, I'm very open.

One of the debates I would love to have publicly is, is the Trinitarian doctrine necessary to be a Christian or something along those lines? Like, is the doctrine of the Trinity compatible with the Bible, for example, which I think it's not in any way, shape, or form? I think the Christological debates, like I said, they weren't resolved because they're not resolvable. okay when when uh jesus you know baptizes in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit to invoke the name of jesus and the holy spirit alongside the name of the father is this not an indication uh when you have the baptism of jesus the the voice of the father the holy spirit descending like a dove and the son himself all like physically but it's an interesting thing about the baptism of Jesus, you have the Trinity all physically present, the vibration

of the air and the father and the dove of the Holy Spirit. Are these not indications of, I don't want to go too deep into Trinitarian form. Well, I would say, I would say, Alex, you just contradicted the Trinity right there because you're implying that God has some sort of a physical form. Like, remember, the God that they talk about is being itself. And not only that, it's three substances in one essence. Like, when you actually drill into the doctrine of the Trinity, it reduces to an incoherency because you can't reconcile the nature of Jesus Christ with the nature of God. For example, Jesus says in his, like, if Jesus was fully God in this life, to be fully God, one of the essential characteristics of being fully God, is that you are omnipotent.

So why does Jesus in the Bible say that there are things that he does not know, such as the day of the second coming. Well, that might be due to something like canosis. That might be due to, I should explain, that might be due to something like, you know, the sun emptying himself off his power in order to come down physically onto planet earth. But God doesn't change. Well, God, does God change?

God seems to change his mind in the Old Testament. I suppose the philosophical God maybe doesn't change. But then talking to me, bear in mind that I'm not defending creedal Christian. Christianity right now. What I'm defending is the Trinity. And so what if God can change and is also a Trinity? You know what I mean? Like maybe this Trinity idea has got something going forward, even if it doesn't neatly fit into the creedal Christian tradition. And we fully agree that the Father, son and Holy Spirit being one and united in a sort of oneness of relationship, like we agree with that. So when you get into the essence of what the doctrine of the Trinity is, you find that there's a lot of

problems, and we don't reject the idea of there being a father, son, and Holy Spirit, and them all being fully divine beings. Like, we don't, like, we accept that. We call this notion the Godhead rather than the Trinity itself. So that's kind of a rabbit hole, obviously, that we could go down, but to kind of continue the story. So you have this idea of you have this state-enforced creed, you know, basically dominating the world for 1,500 years. But then there's this new nation that arises. We got kind of angry about the monarchy, which is something that I think you, Alex, might have some, you can understand how people might get annoyed with that. And so in the United States, we form this new nation that kind of is in a way the first nation that sort of rejects

this idea of a state-enforced creed. And so it's within that context. Now you can see sort of, this is where Joseph Smith comes into the picture. Joseph Smith is, he's 14 years old, the year's 1820, and he is trying to sort out sort of his own religious thing, and he's in the midst of the Second Great Awakening in the United States. So there's this religious fervor and there's a great debate in his area, for instance, between the Methodists and the Presbyterians and sort of Calvinistic doctrines. And he's kind of confused about this.

And I'll just read what he said in his own words. He said, in the midst of this war of words and opinions, I often said to myself, what is to be done? Who of all these parties is right? Or are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it? And how shall I know it? I was one day reading the epistle of James,

which reads, if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and it shall be given him. Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this one did at this time to mine. I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any person needed wisdom from God, I did. At length, I came to the conclusion

that I must either remain in darkness and confusion or else I must do as James directs, and that is, ask of God. So Joseph goes into the woods near his house, and he prays, and he describes what happened. He said, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.

when the light rested upon me I saw two personages whose brightness and glory defy all description they were standing above me in the air one of them spake unto me calling me by name and said pointing to the other Joseph this is my beloved son

hear him so this vision happens he's told that he's not to join any of the churches and that he has this special work that he's supposed to do now I'm just going to address the elephant in the room here now oh go ahead go ahead well that's the vision that Joseph recounted in 1838 correct now he earlier on he he reported this vision at multiple times kind of informally this was his

sort of formal recounting of the story that he gives yes I think it's important for people to know because people will want me to bring it up that there are these sort of two accounts that Smith gives of this event, which some critics say contradict each other. The reasons for that include that in 1832, he says that the primary motivation was not religious confusion on not knowing what to do, but rather he wanted forgiveness for his sins. He was feeling guilty and was looking for forgiveness. Also, in 1832, he only mentioned seeing the Lord, which seems to imply that there's only one figure, especially given the Mormon picture of what the father and the son are as physical beings, the fact that he only sees the Lord, implies one being,

whereas in 1838, as you say, he describes seeing God, the father, and Jesus Christ. There are a few other differences. Just as a point of clarity on this, in different contexts, Joseph is sort of giving this story. In fact, his 1838 account says, look, I know that there's been like different, like people have different ideas about, you know, the sort of gossips about like, what my story is. So I'm just going to lay it out for you guys officially. Now, also, I do believe that Joseph initially interpreted his vision as sort of a born-again experience. If you look at the history, Joseph was in that culture where people were seeking forgiveness of their sins. And I do

think that he had both on his mind. The reason that Joseph was concerned about religion was because, especially within the Calvinist sort of environment of the 1830s, it's very much like, you need to repent or you're going to hell. And so he wanted to know, if I want to get forgiveness of my sins, I need to know sort of which church to join, right? Because they're saying if you join that church, you're going to go to hell. So he's like, I want forgiveness of my sins and this, you know, looking for religious answers, this is how I'm going to get it.

Now, Joseph, I think he wouldn't mention the one figure versus two. I mean, the biggest problem for people, I think, is that in the original recounting, he says he saw the Lord, which again would kind of make sense if at the time, you know, he's obviously not a Mormon yet he's just some kind of Christian and his idea of Christianity is that Jesus is the person that you see, whereas later he might sort of think, oh, I actually know what I saw was the father and the son. Why would he only see one and then see two? Did he just sort of originally see two but not mention the other guy or something like that? When you describe, when he describes the story in that account, it's a much more casual recounting.

You know what I'm saying? He's not going into the details of it. And so I don't, I've never really found that to be a big of an issue. Even before 1832, like if you read the book of Mormon and you have the theory that he's just making this up, the book of Mormon distinguishes between the father and son. It doesn't have, so this notion of them being separate is very, very early in the restoration. And so the fact that he mentions that in 1832 is not, again, it's a much more casual conversation. So I tend to wait. People reading themselves.

I mean, you can read the accounts and see what you make of them. I mean, there is some space to say like, oh, you know, I saw my friend James on his birthday when actually I saw my friend James and Tom as well. We all went together, but it just made sense to say it like that. It could be something like that going on, but that's for the reader to determine, I suppose. Well, and I just want to address the elephant in the room here. We're talking about a guy who's claiming to have seen God, all right? If I had a nickel for every crazy person when I was on the mission who told me that they saw God when I was walking on the street talking to people, I'd be a rich man. Joseph Smith knew his story sounded crazy, okay?

The story of miraculous events happening in upstate New York in the 1820s is just like, are you kidding me? Like, which is funny because it's sort of like, well, why not? Like, it's really easy to believe in the miraculous things that happened a long time ago and a land far, far away. But like, if you're a Christian, you believe that God is working in the world today. You also believe that God surprised people in a similar way in first century Palestine, because people would say, you know, is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, the carpenter? You know, like, does anything good come from Nazareth? Like, people would say the same thing about that. Like, God was expected.

The Messiah would have been expected to be this great military ruler, probably from some kind of kingly line, some kind of, you know, noble birth or something, but instead he's like, born in a manger somewhere. And people would have said at the time, like, as if, as if, you know, God would come there and then, that makes no sense. So I do think it's, it is a psychological phenomenon that when you say, like, you know, God revealed himself in upstate New York, it's like, it's ridiculous. But then maybe some things just are a bit ridiculous, you know? Yeah, you know, if you're someone who believes in a book that has talking donkeys, the parting of seas, and virgins giving birth, it's like, but Joseph having this vision like that's just you know bridge too far jose joseph actually said this he said

i don't blame anyone for not believing my history if i had not experienced what i had i would not have believed it myself so if you find this unbelievable you're in good company um so joseph a few years later he um has this he when he's 17 there's sort of a series of angelic visitations that happen and he's told that he's to bring forth an ancient record that's written on plates that's located in a hill near where he lives. I get it. This sounds absurd. But Christians should keep in mind that while we have at best three eyewitnesses

or eyewitness accounts of the resurrection at best, we have 19 people who said that they saw these plates. And for those who think that he just, oh, well, he made some fake plates, they have to keep in mind that, first of all, there's no, there's zero evidence that he ever made anything fake and also like nothing in the historical record and five of these people said that an angel was present when they were shown the plates so again yes it's a miraculous claim um but these witnesses and i want to encourage people look into the witnesses because what you'll find like is shocking they were extremely dedicated

And there were those that were like, well, they only saw it with like some spiritual eyes. They were hallucinating. And I imagine that's something that you've probably heard or looked into as you've researched it, that they only saw. Yeah, well, it was David Whitmer, I think, who says at some point that he saw the plates with his spiritual eyes, implying that it's some kind of visionary experience rather than, you know, actually seeing some physical golden plates. Yeah. And that was just so everyone knows, like, that's what. people said at the time, and David Whitner addressed that directly. So people were, it's like, oh, it's some kind of like hallucination then. Here's what David Whitmer said. I actually have the quote.

He said, someone once asked him that, and he said, no, sir, I was not under any hallucination, nor was I deceived. I saw with these eyes. I heard with these ears. I know of which I speak. I saw the angel as plainly as I see you. He was surrounded by the glory of God, which overshadowed us, and we heard his voice, and we saw the records of the Book of Mormon. He later, went on to say that, of course, we were in the spirit when we had the view. That was some of the things he said, but he also said, but we were in the body also and everything was as natural to us as it is at any time. Do you think, I mean, there are so many ways to interpret that, I suppose broadly, too.

One is that he's saying, yes, we sort of saw things with our spiritual eyes and we were in the spirit, but like this was a physical, like, thing that we saw. Another is to say, yeah, look, this was a kind of visionary experience, but you have to understand that it was so true, so powerful, that it was like, you know, I saw it with my eyes, man, you know, like, I can kind of read this as it's a little bit strange, somebody saying, look, yes, I was in the spirit, you know, as if I said to you, like, I had a religious experience, I met Jesus, and someone says, well, like, what did he look like? I was, I was kind of meditating. I was like, half asleep, half waking in that weird meditative state, but man, like, I I saw him, you know? You mean, you mean like Paul? Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot to say about Paul.

To the Christians, like, a Christian will come at me and be like, oh, they were just like, it's like, the atheist would say the exact same thing to you guys about Paul. That's right. And I do, I do say the same thing about Paul. I mean, my understanding of Paul's experiences of Christ are extremely visionary in many ways. And there are lots of indications. And there's a lot of discussion about whether Paul was a kind of visionary. And I think that's really interesting. And it's not really an area of expertise for me, but it is one of interest. But I'm happy to say that that's what happened in both of these cases. In the same way that I look at Paul and think, I'm sure something happens to him, but I think it was some kind of visionary experience. When I hear people say, yeah, I saw the golden plates, but I was in the spirit. And I saw it with my spiritual eyes. But man, like, I saw them. You know, I really did see them. The way that I'm interpreting that is as like a really profound spiritual experience, which by the way, could still count for something. Like, especially if people independent. have the same spiritual experience and see the same vision,

which is still pretty cool. Which is exactly what happens with them. This is a, all three of those witnesses described essentially the exact same thing. Now, but this is the thing. People want to say, well,

it wasn't, you know, it was just like, they just hallucinated. Hold on here. What about the people that, like, so there's a guy named John Whitmer,

who's actually the brother of David, who was, who has shown the plates as one of the eight witnesses. The eight witnesses just like, he just gave it to him. He was like, here, check him out. And they turned him over.

now when John was got really old it's in the late 1800s he was interviewed by a newspaper guy who was like you know let's he kind of heard these rumors right like they're all like hallucinating it so he goes and and there was also a rumor that they only saw it under a cloth that they never actually held them and in the newspaper report the reporter says this did you see them covered in a cloth he's asking John this John just goes no he handled the he handed them uncovered into our hands and we turned the leaf sufficiently to satisfy us the reporter says then they were a material substance? And John just goes, yes, as material as anything can be. And he goes, well, how big were the leaves? He goes, well, they're about eight by six or seven inches. And so, I mean, this guy isn't reporting angels or hallucinations. He's like, he just gave it to us. And that was the testimony of the eight witnesses. So you have- The testimony of the eight witnesses, crucially, the actual testimonies themselves are not written by the eight witnesses, right? They're written by Oliver Cowdery and they sign the witness statements. So we don't have the original document that they signed.

What people talk about and they all say, oh, well, it's all in Oliver Cowdery's handwriting. Keep in mind, what they're talking about is the printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon. In other words, he had to put together the, like, what's going to go in the book of Mormon? And at the front of it, they wanted to include the witness statement. So if he's the one who's putting this together for the printer, it's like, yeah. Yeah, but crucially, we don't have the autographs, similarly to how we don't have the autographs of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and a lot of people point to that and say, that gives them disputed authorship.

This is such a silly criticism, in my opinion, because we have tons of statements from those witnesses afterwards. They were literally in their lives going out and handing out books with their names in it. So to say that we don't have the signatures is just like to strain it a gnat. And one of them, one of my favorite of the witnesses is Joseph's brother Hiram. Hiram was a good man. Now, you hear a lot of Christians say, no one will die for a lie, right?

Well, shortly after the Missouri extermination order, this is what Hiram said about his, about being a witness. He said, I thank God that I felt a determination to die rather than to deny the things which my eyes had seen and which my hands had handled. He's talking about the plates.

And which I had borne testimony to. Wherever my lot had been cast, I can assure my beloved brethren that I was unable to bear as strong a testimony when nothing but death presented itself as ever it did, as ever I did in my life. Now, here's the wild thing.

About three years after that, or four years after that statement was made, Hiram was shot in the face by a mob. So, was he sincere? Like, was he killed in such a way that recanting would have helped him? Because, like, if he's shot by an angry mob, is that, is that he's shot at the same time as Joseph Smith? Yeah. They're in the same prison cell. We'll get into that story.

Regardless, the latter-day saints were being persecuted, including Hiram, and had multiple run-ins these witnesses where their lives were in jeopardy. There was an extermination order on them. Yeah, can we talk about the Missouri? Yeah, that's right. We've sort of a bit all over the place, but I think it's, I will bring it back to this, because I also want to talk about that language that the Golden Plates were written in. But the Missouri Extermination Act, this is one of the things that, like,

like, you know, my eyebrows haven't quite come back to their normal level since you first sold me about this in Los Angeles. What happened there? So when the saints began to settle, after the church was established, Joseph began to, his work was to establish Zion. It was to establish the kingdom of God on earth. And one of the first things he was going to do was to gather together the members of the church to create essentially what is like a center place and from that place they would go and sort of spread the gospel to the world and so he made a there's a little bit of a problem when you do this in if you take a bunch of northern yankees in the 1830s to a southern slave state and you put them all in one city together

it tends to kind of fire people up and so you have these you know people who are northern yankees against slavery like Joseph Smith was, and they all move into this city together, and they start to sort of take over the political against democracy, and people begin to get really upset about this, and it's sort of like, and this is back in the day when you lynch people, and there's a lot of vigilante justice, and there's tons of battles over states' rights and autonomy, and what eventually happens is there is conflicts with the saints, and the governor of Missouri sides with the mobs, essentially, and says, we need to get these people out of our state. And so he passes an order that says that the Mormons need to be exterminated and or driven from the state of

Missouri. And they work. So what does that, what does that mean? Like, what does the legislation actually say, you know, your average Missourian, Missouri and whatever could do when they see a Mormon? My understanding is that they could kill them. And I, and I had to look more into that to all the details, but it was more like, they literally were like, get out of here or else your life will be at stake. It was, the language of the bill is extermination, so far as I understand anyway. And I, I mean, if there's any, I'm not a lawyer here, so if there is some ambiguity on that, I would, I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, at the very least, we're dealing with persecution here, right? And I'm quite strongly worded persecution. For example, it wasn't just in word either. Hans Mill, if you ever look that up, is where a group of children and men were murdered in a mill by a mob during this time. And I don't know that there was any prosecution of them for those crimes so far as I know. Yeah, like my understanding, Missouri Executive Order 44, if people wish to look it up, is that it's sort of giving a legal ability, like a legal cover for violence, persecution, and killing of Mormons as a drive to get them out of the state. So, yeah, there are also examples of like massacres against Mormons.

What's the one that you were just talking about? What's it called? The Hans Mill Massacre. Yes, yeah, I just pulled up some information about that where 17 men and boys are killed, and nothing comes of it, no legal repercussions? Not that I'm not aware of any, I've never heard of anything that came about because of that. So we're dealing with a persecuted religious minority, you know, it's not just a happy sect in secular America. No, absolutely not. And those witnesses at any time, here's the other wild thing. about half of them at some point were excommunicated by Joseph

or under his authority from the church so if you're part of this sort of fraudulent scheme you can expose it Oliver Cowdery for instance when he was estranged from the church he was he ran for an election and he stood to win until people began to bring up that

hey he's one of the Mormon witnesses and he didn't recant he just lost the election so so Cowdery's somebody who falls out with Joseph Smith. Caldry is one of the witnesses of the Golden Plates, you know, has his statement.

Fools out with Joseph Smith is excommunicated from the LDS church, but doesn't recant his witness to the Golden Plates. He is later re-baptized into the LDS church. I think after Smith's death, right? Yeah, he does come back. And it's, in fact, his dying, the last testimony of what he said on his deathbed is something that has always struck me,

especially for those who are just like, ah, it's just like hallucinating weirdos. He says to his friend Jacob, he says, Jacob, I want you to remember what I say to you. I'm a dying man, and what would it profit me to tell you a lie? I know that the book of Mormon

was translated by the gift and power of God. My eyes saw, my ears heard, and my understanding was touched, and I know whereof I testified as true. It was no dream, no vain imagination of the mind. It was real. Now, if a Christian found a statement

from Peter like that, can you imagine That would be the biggest, like, thing in the Christian world ever. And, but when we bring up these witnesses, they don't even, like, they'll just say that, no, they had denied it. They let, they don't even know the story. So I just tell everyone, like, the witnesses to the gold plates, as crazy as that story sounds, those people believed it. And most historians, even the ones who were really critical, who study the issue closely, they believe that Joseph had some kind of a metal object. Like, the witnesses are too strong to say otherwise.

They'll dispute what that is. But like some sort of metal object was in the possession of Joseph Smith based on the historical record. Sure. But the thing that makes that, I think, less impressive than the witnesses to the resurrection or something, which you're right to point out we don't have any first hand written accounts of. But of course, if you see a man crucified and then see him three days later, that is not something that has a lot of room for, you know, interpretive problems. Like, that is a miracle. Whereas if you've got a bunch of people who say that they saw some golden plates that they couldn't read, okay, some of them say that they saw an angel as well. We don't really know what an angel would have looked like. Maybe there was just

another guy there who just like, you know, they thought looked really nice. You know, we don't really know all of the details exactly. What we know is that we've got some people who claimed to have seen some golden plates. Those golden plates could have said anything. They could have been anything. They could have come from anywhere. And so I think that even if you grant this, you know, wonderful collection of signed statements, it's not going to do that much to convince somebody that something miraculous has happened because they haven't witnessed a miracle. They've just witnessed a metal object. Yeah, I mean, if you want to throw out the statements of the witnesses to the angel and say that all these guys were diluted, like, yeah, you can make that case. but I and I don't I don't go just on the witnesses alone in fact I don't I'm not so everyone knows here I'm not here making the case that what I'm going to say to you today is going to like prove Mormonism or something like that what I'm going to say is is that it's going to show you that we aren't just like coming out of nowhere here in fact I think the the almost more remarkable thing is the coming forth of the book of Mormon itself okay it I want people to imagine that they have to sit down and write eight like right now you have to write eight um

eight pages of single space essay today. One draft, you just go for it. That's a challenge. That's something that's kind of tough to do. Now do that every single day for the next two and a half months. Okay. So Joseph, that's what Joseph did

when he translated the book of Mormon. This is a very well-documented thing that happened. Okay. He produces this book that quickly in a single draft. And just some interesting facts about it. They've done sort of textual analysis on it. The book has 19 unique voices. It has

200 named characters with plausible Hebrew origins. There are so here are some names in it for example. Himnai, Chemish, Amonai, Mathanai, Nephi, Alma, Rabana, Luram, Sam, Mulek, Panchi,

Pahoranchi. These 12 names sound pretty ridiculous, right? Like guys, somebody's just making that all of those names were discovered at different times in authentic ancient texts from that time in the Near East. These are authentic ancient names. There's a really interesting one. It talks about a guy named Mulek, who's the son of Zedekiah.

Well, later archaeology shows that Zetakia did have a son named Malkiah, and Mulek is a very plausible rendering. there's a shortened version of that name. It's like saying that he had a son named Michael and then you find that he, you know, the book of Mormon says he had a son named Mike, right? Yeah, so just to be clear,

the Book of Mormon recounts the happenings of ancient America. Yes. And so what you're talking? Yes and no. So there's people have a little bit of a, let me do this real quick

just to give kind of the overview of what this book has in it. Okay. Yeah, because I think that's important. to understand even the point you're making here. Yeah, yeah. And people make it, they sort of, there's a lot of bad assumptions

about the Book of Mormon that people make. They assume that it's like the story of all Native Americans that ever lived or something like that. And there have been members of the church who have had that opinion, even leaders of the church. But the text doesn't necessitate

that sort of an interpretation. And so if you were to talk with the Latter-day St. scholars who kind of understand the book well and have studied the text and really analyze this, what it is, it's a library of complex storylines, but there's this overall story of a group of First Temple Israelites from the tribe of Manasseh, fleeing the coming destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. And they have essentially a miraculous journey where they end up in this foreign land and that we now know is the American continent.

And over time, these refugees become participants in the civilization of the ancient Americas, forming their own sort of ethno-religious group that they call Nephites. And they preserve this sort of messianic tradition of their forefathers on metal plates. And then what they do is they distinguish between their group and everyone else calling themselves Neph. I'll actually read Jacob in Jacob 114 from the Book of Mormon. Jacob says, I shall not distinguish them by their names, but I shall call them Lamanites that seek to destroy the people of Nephi. And those who are friendly to Nephi, I will call Nephites. so and by the way if this has tons of ancient precedent

you know the Jews everyone else were Gentiles for the Greeks everyone else were Babylonians so this sort of a dichotomy is set up and it culminates this book culminates in this messianic you know the prophecies of this messianic tradition coming true with the Messiah

appearing and ministering to this group of this tradition that is continued amongst the peoples of the ancient Americas and then it ultimately ends with this group's downfall and the records being hidden. Now, at a certain level, people can think that this is crazy, but for a Christian who believes in the scattering of the house of Israel,

this is sort of a biblical thing, right? To say that in that scattering, somehow a messianic tradition was preserved in some far off land far from Israel, again, maybe hard to believe, and I can see how people will say that, But also, like, it's not outside the realm of, you know, if you're talking about the Exodus story and that kind of stuff, I don't think this falls outside of that book. Noah building a really large boat in order to, you know, stay afloat a large mass of water for a considerable time. It's not unthinkable that people would potentially manage to sail to America. Yes.

And so the Christians that kind of laugh this off. And again, I always say, if you believe in the Bible and you, and you, and you, you, take it seriously. There's no reason that you can't take this seriously as well. Another thing is, and you'll notice this and anyone who reads it will notice it, the final rendering of the text of the Book of Mormon is clearly 19th century King James English. Now, that does not mean that the original people were talking like that. It's obviously in the vocabulary that was available to Joseph Smith. Yes. So a few problems with that though. Well, there are lots to say. I mean, you mentioned the Native Americans, which I think have,

who I think have an interesting relationship with Mormonism. But one straightforward thing is that the Book of Mormon seems to suggest that Native Americans descend from Israelites. They say that the Native Americans, the inhabitants of the Americas, were descended from that same Joseph who was enslaved in Egypt. Now, DNA evidence has shown that that's not the case. We know that Native Americans are not descended from Israelites, but the Book of Mormon says that they are. So in the same way that you've got some interesting claims of Joseph Smith

that are later shown archaeologically to be like, oh, interesting, maybe some proof here. This seems to be something working in the opposite direction. Yeah. And so this is where people bring a lot of assumptions. of the text. If somebody and anyone who has the idea that all Native Americans are descendants from Lehman and Lemuel in the Book of Mormon, like that's wrong. That's not true. Like the DNA proves it. Like, sorry, that's not something that's going to work. But the text doesn't necessitate

that that is the case for all of them. This is the story of a group of refugee people who end up integrating into this society. Now, Lehman and Lemuel are a group that break off from the main group. And eventually, there's the idea in the text is that this group is, uh, they begin to interact with the other people that are around and they assume that those people are the descendants of Lehman and Lemuel. Okay. Now, I believe that, you know, is there some sort of connection amongst some peoples in the ancient Americas? Sure. But if you were to look, for example, there, there are great Latter-day Saint geneticists, um, who have talked about this, and these are really well-respected geneticists. And what they point out is that, remember, a lot

people think DNA in like individual genetics like OJ Simpson trial or something like that's a very different thing than population genetics okay first of all you have to identify a single family from a lost tribe in Israel from 3,000 years ago just to find out what you're looking for is what's called the founder effect then you have the problems of genetic drift over time you also have population bottlenecks like there were Africans from the Romans that were in in Europe that um that show up in the historical records but like aren't really part of the DNA of of your average Britain that doesn't mean that they weren't there but to say that the Native Americans are descendants of Joseph particularly like but we we know that Native Americans came

from Asia not from Israel like is that a is that like a problem for you do do does that give you sort of so that the church says that that that the the descendants of the Book of Mormon are among the ancestors of the Native Americans, but not that they are the, and there used to be the idea that many members of the church did think that, but the text doesn't necessitate it. And when the evidence doesn't line up

with something that isn't necessitated by the text of the book, well, then you make adjustments, right? You say, look, the text doesn't necessitate this. So why are we saying this if the text doesn't require that every Native American be a descendant, from layman and Lemuel

who are the members of the family, right? And there's, again, this is a rabbit hole you can go down where there's a lot there, but population genetics aren't as precise as a lot of people think they are. For instance, Ashkenazi Jews, a lot of them have no near-eastern DNA

at all. And so, the genetic profile, for instance, Science Magazine in 2018 did a study on Iceland, an Iceland, like the most interesting, like, you want to take a group of people that are just, like, isolated and in one place,

they show that about 70 years, about 1,000 years ago, 70% of the genetic profile of the Icelanders back then is different than the Icelanders of today. So, while this obviously is something that'll put on the reasons to doubt side of the scale,

to me, it's not like a defeater. Sure. Okay, so how about the eight mentions of horses in the Book of Mormon as existing in the New World? And we know that horses did not exist in the New World at the time they were purported to by the Book of Mormon. So in the Book of Mormon, you have anachronisms. Like, we all know that. What's really interesting is there are, and I'll get to the horses. I just want to kind of talk about anachronism generally because this is part of a bigger subject of there are anachronisms in the Book of Mormon.

And we're like, yes, there are. So what do you mean by anachronisms in the book of one? Anachronisms are things that shouldn't be there, for example. The Bible has anachronisms, for example. Talks about two ball cane making iron tools. That was before the Iron Age, right? So, or it talks about candlesticks in the English translation of the Bible, when candlesticks didn't exist in first century Palestine.

These are things that don't belong. Now, how, there, so. Anachronisms can form because of two reasons. One is that they could just be an apparent anachronism. So it's something that we don't think is there, but actually is. So, for example, there's been a bunch of these. There was a, in the 1960s, I think there was this giant list of anachronisms in the book of Mormon.

And since that time, due to more archaeological discoveries, I think like 70% of that list has shrunk, like cement. They said there was no cement in the ancient Americas, and then they discovered it, right? So some of these are apparent. The other thing that you can have are what are known as a translator's anachronism. This is what happens with candlesticks. Candlesticks didn't exist in first century Palestine,

but the word that best conveys it to the author is a candlestick. That's sort of the best thing you can do to convey the idea. And the Book of Mormon is not a... People should think of it as a translation that was done into King James English of the 19th century according to the vocabulary available to Joseph Smith

as a functional translation, not like a tight word for word type of translation. If anyone has ever read, and this exists in the Bible already. Like we have people who know of the message Bible. Like that is a functional translation. It sort of paraphrases, summarizes, and tells the story that's in the Bible,

but it does it in a way that is meant to talk to a modern audience in terms and ideas that they understand. So if you understand the Book of Mormon's translation to be a revealed translation for our day into language that would have been compelling to a 19th century and modern audience, then a lot of these issues become much smaller issues. I'm not going to say they're not there.

I'm not going to say they aren't, again, if you have reasons to believe and reasons to doubt, like there are reasons to doubt. But if I can for a second, I want to go over some of the reasons I believe. I wanted to just, because I know I'm sort of throwing these criticisms at you, but since we're on this archaeological point, you mentioned before about the names, the names that sort of show up. Yes. So Joseph Smith, or rather the Book of Mormon mentions names which we didn't think existed and then they're later discovered to have existed. How do you discover that these names exist?

Do we like find texts or what? Yes. So what's happened is in, and there are Latteray St. scholars that have kind of looked for this because we know we have these names in the Book of Mormon. We're like, okay, well, where these just made up? And they'll go and look and they will find some of these names in other ancient sources that you find that they were discovered in some texts that came out in the, you know,

in the 1960s or in like the Nakamati library and things. And how much of these are just, like portmanteaus, just like putting together of different names and sort of coming up with plausible sounding names, especially given that I don't know how many names it is that I mentioned in the Book of Mormon that we don't think exist, but if there's a lot of them and then we start to discover that a handful of them are actually attested in historical documents, that wouldn't be a surprise to me if the names that are being invented are oftentimes just like expansions or combinations of you know known hebrew names you know yeah no and and and you'd have to look at

the specifics of those it would be it still would be interesting to me that a third you know a farmer with a third grade education on the american frontier is all the sudden coming up with names that are that even has the ability to put these together in such a way that it would work like if i wanted you to go out and try and do this that would be challenging and i want to see there's a there's a part of this that again to put the evidence on the other side of the scale okay all right

Joseph is able to produce eight single space pages a day for two and a half months in a stream of consciousness dictation produce in one draft this complex set of stories with so let me actually go back one second

you have in this book calendar systems, overlapping timelines, consistent complex genealogies, caustic poetry, psalms, integrated biblical prophecies, novel theology, Hebrew customs like covenant renewal festivals, ancient legal procedures, authentic sacrifice rituals.

So here's a really interesting one. Have you heard anything about Nahom? I don't think, I mean, I've heard, it, but I don't know where you're going with it. So, so Joseph Smith apparently just predicts that there's this place in the near east called Nahom. Yeah, this is the, yeah, yeah, the sort of lush place. No, no, actually, it's not the lush place.

It's, that's, that's, that's another place that is also predicted. So this is the one with the name, right? Yes, the name. I'll tell you, why don't you tell the story? Yeah, so, so in the book of first Nephi, by the way, I like to ask Christians, is there better evidence for the book of first Nephi archaeologically or for the book of Exodus? snap and the reality is and and and the reality is is that in the book of first nephite talks about this place called nahom now nahom

now naham shows up basically exactly where the the book says it's going to be it wasn't discovered until the 20th century it is a place of burials it comes from the right time it's a place of barrels this matters because in the story they bury ishmael there and by the way they've actually found graves there with the name Ishmael on it from that time period, not saying that it is the guy. And then it says that due east of Nahe, after they went to this place called Nahom, they went due east to the coast. And they came to this place and they called it bountiful because it had a lush climate, iron ore, fruit trees, wild honey, lumber for building a boat. There's all these things that it describes. And what's wild is, in the 20th,

the 20th century, they discover Nahom exists, and guess what happens if you go exactly east of Nahom? You discover a place that has all of these elements. They've had 12 separate elements that they found in this location that correspond exactly to what the, to what the Book of Mormon says. So, go ahead. Why do you think that this site discovered is the Nahome of the Book of Mormon? It's in the right place. It's in the right time. It's a place to burial. As far as I understand, there's no consensus amongst LDS scholars where the events of the Book of Mormon took place. So there isn't a consensus on where it took place once they arrived in the new world.

But there is essentially a consensus about where the events in the old world took place according to that story. And the thing is that these places weren't like, it's not like Joseph who's living in the middle of the nowhere on the frontier of the United States, has these maps with like all of these. detailed things. And in fact, my understanding is, and I could be wrong, this was essentially undiscovered until the 20th century in any meaningful way. Now, how precise is the description? Like when you say that there's this other place due east of Nehom, does it say how far? Does it say it's two days traveled, or is it just sort of? They don't give the direct travel or how long it takes them for that area in particular, But there is another part where they describe going three days south journey from where the borders of the Red Sea are.

So this is when they initially leave. And they say they come to a river. And there is a place where there's a river that goes into the red sea at that place, 60 miles south of Akaba in Jordan. And even there, there's a description given that there's this analogy that's given that there's a great valley. there and lehi says that he wishes that his son was sturdy like these like this valley and when you actually go to the location there are these giant stone walls of this very narrow valley that go right along with it so when you start adding all of these things up um there's this argument to absurdity that i like to make and if i could just have a a minute i want to kind of lay it out because i think

when it when it all comes together any one of these things can be picked apart but when you put all together, something really weird emerges. Like, for you, Alex, you're a smart guy. Let's say that I wanted you to, for the next two and a half months, to write eight single spage paces a day, pages a day, in a single draft, come up with 200 characters with plausible Hebrew names, with 12 of them then being discovered. I want you to predict undiscovered locations in the Near East. I want you to have 12 elements of one of those locations actually correspond to the location that you just made up. You have to have 19 different voices in this text that you produce.

You have to have caustic poetry, novel theology. You have to somehow make fake plates and then convince 19 people to go to their death saying that an angel was involved in giving them this. You have to have four of these people, you know, say an angel, and report the same sort of experience and be willing to suffer persecution for it. And not only that, here's the weird. thing. This book has to become the most influential religious book since the Quran. Tens of millions of people have to regard this as the word of God. Now, I'm just going to stop and say,

I'm not saying that this proves anything. I'm saying that it's really weird. This kind of stuff doesn't happen every day. And not only that, there's one other part of this. This book has to have an incredibly powerful sort of spiritual effect on people. Okay. Latter-day Saints are seven times more likely, or they give seven times more volunteer work to their community than your average American. They're four to six times, they give four to six times more to non-profits than your average American. Sociologically, Latter-day Saints are more likely to be college educated than the general population. They live seven years longer on average. which is wild and that isn't just because of the smoking thing by the way and drinking stuff

they have they've been shown to have better physical health on average better mental health on average um they are in according to pew the university of pennsylvania gallop USA today in the happiness surveys that they've done on different religious groups latter day saints are near the top um for the Christians out there latter day saints pray more than any other Christian group with their families. They study the Bible more with their families than any other Christian group.

Their marriages last three to five times or they're three to five times less likely to end in divorce. They have more children than any other religious group in America. It's weird. Whatever this is, it's weird.

Well, give me three months and I'll give it a go. I know, right? See what I can come up with. One last thing, one last thing on this. okay imagine I came up to you and I had a pill

and I said Alex take this pill and like where'd you get it from and I said an angel gave it to me you're just going to be like ah ha ha ha you know you're going to think it's ridiculous

now let's change this analogy around let's say that there's this pill that people start to take and it just changes them let's say that there is a prison you give it to all the prisoners in there and the prison just turns into this like they're all kind to

other they just help one another like that would be really weird and then you come then you come to the person say this crazy pill where'd you get it from you say an angel gave it to me like now there's a side where you go wait what like when you had your conversation with jordan peterson you like that is what's going on with jordan see jordan is looking at the christian story and he's going this story has built the entire world that i know and it's so incredibly powerful. And then you're there going, yeah, but Jordan, like, remember, he said he got it from an angel. Like, do you really believe that Jesus walked out of that tomb?

And Jordan is going, I think it probably did. And I'm the same way. I'm looking at this going, this is an incredible story. It's really weird. I'm almost tempted to believe it. Yeah, I'm not particularly. moved by these kinds of sociological approaches, I think that's more likely to work

on somebody who takes that line of thought when talking about something like Christianity, like the Peterson's, all the Ian Herssey-A-L-E types out there. For me, it does say something. Like, it's, at the very least, it's not disconfirming, if you know what I mean. Like, if it did make people

worse, or it sort of had no effect or something, that would be disconfirming evidence. So it gets the tick in the box that it doesn't do that. It's complicated because, of course, it's not unthinkable to me that there would be a religion that is invented, essentially, which happens to just make everybody's lives better in these ways. That wouldn't prove its truth. Coupled together with the interesting story about the plates and the witnesses and stuff,

you're right. You sort of have to look at it holistically. And like you say, you're not looking to establish the truth of Mormonism today. But it's something for people to think about, and I don't know how much of an effect it will have on other people. For me, these sociological approaches are interesting, but don't say that much more than how successful sociologically a religion is. Well, and that's kind of why at the beginning I said, look, for an atheist that's approaching this, you have to approach this from the fact that it's sort of like, hey, it's just a sociological curiosity. But if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, they asked Jesus, you know, how will we know like if someone's an actual prophet? By their fruits. By their fruits. He says,

by this shall men know that ye are my disciples if you have love one unto another it isn't if you have the proper trinitarian formulation like these people who know the the the bible super well and have these families like they're going to hell you know it's i'm not asking anyone to just listen to what i'm saying and be like oh this is obviously true like look at this great evidence like you've said it's not a, it isn't a, uh, it's a spiritual experience that ultimately pushes us over the edge. But that doesn't mean that there's nothing to this that can be argued, especially from the perspective of a, of a Christian with sort of those Christian presuppositions that miracles are real, that Christ calls prophets that, um, by their fruits, you shall know them. Like, yeah, I think these

things have to be paid attention to. Now, having said all of that, There are some points of criticism that I think are important for us to address before we end the podcast today. Firstly, what language is the Book of Mormon written in on the golden plates? So the book talks about, again, the words that Joseph Smith comes up with to describe it in his translation is something like a reformed Egyptian. Reformed Egyptian. So it's some kind of, it's like analogous to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Not necessarily. Again, I don't want to make too many claims about exactly what this is, how this language works. I'm not a linguist. There are Latter-day Saint linguists that have definitely talked about this. But again, Reformed Egyptian is about as far as I can go with it. Now, as you say, we have some descriptions about the physical characteristics of the plates. We know sort of roughly how big they were.

We know, like, the size of the plates. And, of course, we also know how much information was put on the golden plates, because we have our English translation. Of course, it wasn't written in English on the plates. But we know, like, the amount of information. Given what we know about the size of the plates, and given what we know about the size of the plates, and given that there are 269,320 words of the English Book of Mormon

that Joseph Smith recited, translated, whatever. I've seen estimates that if you had sort of 50 to 100 plates, which seems like a reasonable estimate, I mean, would you agree that they were probably between 50 and 100 golden plates?

I actually wouldn't. You're bringing up the, how could all of this information had fit onto those plates? Yes, because you're going to say that they're much thinner? So they have, there actually have been people who have studied this pretty in depth. Okay. And there are absolutely ways that it could have fit on it within the thickness of known alloys that would be used for this sort of thing.

So to be clear, like the, if you look at another example of a metal plates, and this is something that Trent Horn brings up in his debate to you, he mentions the metal plates of Darius, which are. written in a few different languages. They're written in Old Persian. They're written in Akkadian. They're in some other language that I can't pronounce. Elamite. And each plate contains around 200 English words. Like in translation, we get about 200 English words per plate, right? There are 270,000 words in the Book of Mormon. So, like, obviously it's a different language that we're talking about here. But if that is the kind of information density that we tend to find in these sort of symbolic languages, it is difficult to imagine how somebody would take 270,000 words and fit them onto golden plates that, like, you know,

would sort of off the size described. It seems like you have to have like entire paragraphs represented by like singular symbols. Yeah, I would say that I would dispute the number of number of I would have to point you to people that have actually made videos on this actually have one on my channel I don't have it off the top of my head some of the research on this but when you actually take the thickness of the plates and change it to the number of plates it would have been available they were described as being as thin as like pliable paper so they were very thin in according to the descriptions from the witnesses and when you take into account how small the text could be made like it doesn't rule

this out. And then there's another aspect to this that people have talked about. As I think a possibility, if this is a revealed translation, there's nothing in there that can't expand certain ideas that are in the original text. Blake Osler, who's a great scholar, Latter-day Saint scholar, has a paper about the expansion theory around the Book of Mormon, that some of this may have been expanded ideas that exist. So, again, yes, I put this in the, okay, this is sort of an interesting puzzle, but I don't think that it's something that sort of comes away showing that it's impossible. I think people overstate their claim. It would have to be an incredible document, right? And I don't know much about this. I mean, I haven't read the book of

Mormon. And I knew nothing about Mormonism until we met fairly recently in Los Angeles. So yeah, we're sort of learning on the spot here. But as far as I understand it, like, this is just the golden plates are written accounts of the people who had fled. who had fled Jerusalem, and they end up burying these plates somewhere. And so, like, the writing of the plates isn't itself like a miraculous occurrence? This is just a people writing down in their language, the events of their lives. And so if we did end up happening to find, if it did happen that this occurred on these incredibly thin golden plates, which we don't really find anywhere else, we find plates, but we

don't find them that thin we don't find that much information put onto that size of plates it would have to be this like remarkable and unique set of texts at the very least right to a certain to a certain degree there again some of the stuff that you're bringing up i know it's been disputed because i've i've seen apologetics on this subject i don't have them here but like there are there are texts that are extremely small in the ancient world that they would that they would do. Also, the thickness of the plates, you can make certain things like tumbaga that they've talked about that can be made extremely thin. It's just one of those things again that, yeah, sure, I can see why this would be a challenge, but it's one that when I stack up all the other things,

I end up in this situation where it's like, look, yeah, I have reasons to doubt. But if I'm trying to account for all of that, I also have to try and account for all these reasons that I believe. And a lot of those reasons there is evidentiary stuff there as i've kind of talked about which again people can debate and dispute but um i think that there's like ultimately like with like with any christian for example talking about various things there are reasons to believe there are reasons to doubt and i think that we have a strong case as strong as strong as any christian case and then there is sort of the effect that this has on sort of a spiritual level, right? Yeah. So I'm, I'm not going to, I don't want to, I don't want to put you on the spot. And if you send me after this a link to the video that you have or other videos discussing this. I'll put it in the description because I think this will, this will be important to people because it's, it's one of the, it's an interesting sort of physical, uh, dispute, right? Like we can, there's things that we can learn. We can discover how ancient plates were inscribed. We can discover how thin, you can realistically cut gold and it still be legible.

We can discover ancient languages and how they condense information. And just to be clear, like, the plates had an appearance of gold. There's the idea that they are actually like 24-carat-tallet gold, that is not what we believe about that. Just kind of clear that out. That's instructive too, I think. That's useful. But I did want to ask, because I'd want to ask, I'd want to.

to see some, like, really miraculous kind of evidence and the kind of stuff you're talking about, like, places being described and showing up, given that we have this community of hundreds of thousands of people, ancient people, Nephites, living in, like, early America, like pre-Columbian America, for years, hundreds of thousands of people, speaking. I don't know that I would go that far again. There are some assumptions in other people make that this group was. enormously huge right it's kind of like with the book of Exodus right like how many Israelites were there in the Sinai Peninsula to say that there's some level of

exaggeration in some of the stories like I think that that's totally a possible possibility also where did it like where did it happen there's disputes about that the reality is that we know very little about sort of ancient Mesoamerican civilization to to quote a a particular scholar who George Stewart when he was asked by National Geographic about the ancient Mayan civilization for example the Maya weren't like one people

it's like a general geographic ancient group that lived he said we hardly know anything about the Maya there's almost 6,000 archaeological sites and we've dug it like 40 of them we're just at the beginning of the archaeology in this part of the world Edwin Barnhart reported that you know they've done like less than 1% of Mesoamerica has really been studied and in the jungle areas like there's not much there so so i wouldn't

expect that like we're going to find all of this stuff um yeah so to be clear we haven't that like none of the following as far as i'm aware have been found any archaeological evidence for these ancient civilizations living in the americas no inscriptions of hebrew or anything like reformed egyptian anywhere in america like if we found a hebrew inscription just a single Hebrew inscription somewhere in ancient America, that would be pretty extraordinary and pretty extraordinary evidence. There are some disputed fines that are out there on that. I'm not going to weigh in on them because I don't know enough about them. But I also know that the Book of Mormon, again, there's an assumption here that the lingua franca of the people in the Book of Mormon was some sort of Hebrew or Egyptian. That's actually not what the text indicates.

The text itself indicates that the record keepers kept a particular language. that they would use for the record keeping that was not the language of the people and it says that the language of the people was deeply corrupted and changed over time. That's what the text actually says. It would be like if somebody came, you know, 10,000 years from now

and they came to the Americas and they're like, we don't find Cajuns anywhere. We just find this thing about Americans and World War II and all that, like not realizing that Cajuns were a, subset group that actually came from another land in Canada and were like an ethno tradition within that culture. And I think that is the better way for people to understand it.

Yes. I see what you're saying. Worth pointing out, these are some of the criticisms that people put forward. And worth pointing out as well that I'll miss criticisms here. Like I will miss there will be ex-Mormon screaming at the screen saying, oh, for sure. There's I hope to do an okay job and continuing in that vein, the main areas that I want to talk about in the time that we have remaining are I think I have three points of criticism which are probably the most, not just the most common critiques of Mormonism, but also probably the critiques that give people the most pause for thought as Mormons. These are the kinds of things which cause Mormons to leave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Perhaps the most, maybe not the most famous,

but the most talked about at the moment, the most sort of hot topic, is that. In 1835, there is a traveling mummy exhibition. Somebody's discovered a bunch of ancient hieroglyphics and mummies, and they're touring them around. And Joseph Smith meets this dealer and decides to purchase, I think, a couple of mummies and some Egyptian hieroglyphics. Because he identifies that these Egyptian, hieroglyphics are in fact what he calls the book of Abraham.

That is, a story written by Abraham about like his early life. And this is an extraordinary find, right? Like a new biography of the patriarch Abraham. And so he takes these hieroglyphics and he miraculously translates them because, you know, we were just beginning to discover how to translate hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone had been discovered, but on a different continent, and most people didn't know how to read these hieroglyphics. So Joseph Smith starts translating these in 1835, and pens what becomes the Book of Mormon, which is now still part of Mormon scripture, right? It's part of the Pearl of Great Price, which is part of your

scriptural canon. The problem is that we thought we lost. the papyrus, the papy that Joseph Smith had bought in the Great Chicago Fire, whenever that was in the 1800s, I forget exactly, but it was assumed that the papyri had been lost a time, but we still had Joseph Smith's translation.

But then, in the 20th century, I think, the Metropolitan Museum of Art discovers that in their vaults, they have some of the Joseph Smith papyri, and they identify them as such. I want to point something out. I want to point something out, though, here. I want to make sure that you recognize that you said they found some of the papyri.

Okay, so this is, one of the things is that people believe that we have all of the papyri that Joseph Smith originally had, and that actually is not the case, because there was papyri that was lost in that fire so far as the records indicate. So now we can translate Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Egyptologists look at the Joseph Smith papyri and they recognize them almost immediately as basic funerary rights. In other words, having nothing to do with Abraham,

not mentioning Abraham, not even coming close to saying anything about Abraham. And so the problem here is that the book of Abraham has been translated by Joseph Smith from hieroglyphics. And when we discover those hieroglyphics, the ones that Joseph Smith actually owned and we look at them, there is zero mention of Abraham. You've already just preempted there one of the responses that LDS members give to this,

but will you at least admit at the beginning that this is one of the big factors in causing Mormons to question the validity of the scriptural tradition? Oh, for sure, for sure. I often say that the Book of Abraham is probably the biggest one. My issue, though, is that it can be exaggerated. It's a highly debated topic, and people make claims about it that aren't. that aren't correct. So first of all, they say,

well, we found the source text of the book of Abraham. It doesn't match. It's over. You know, false translation. First of all, that's just, that's just not true because we don't know

if we have the source text of the book of Abraham. What we have actually are, well, two things. Joseph's, there's the text of the book of Abraham itself. And then there are the facsimiles or sort of like drawings

that accompanied it. Okay? Yep. So within these facts similes they are so it's the difference of the analogy I like to use is like a children's book right so imagine you have the children's book but the text has been torn away you you don't have that but you do have on the left a drawing and you need to interpret that drawing now Joseph did offer interpretations of those drawings okay and those those interpretations that he offered

don't match entirely with the Egyptological understanding of those drawings. However, he did get several things right, which is really interesting because he should have gotten nothing right, such as the crocodile, the water that's underneath is the heavens above. There are these boxes near the bottom

that he said with the pillars of heaven. That is actually the proper Egyptological interpretation. There's these four jars in one of them or four figures that he says are the four quarters of the earth. and that is actually correct. So there are things that he gets right in it, but there are things that he does not get right that contradict the Egyptological interpretation.

And so what are we to make of that? Well, first of all, there needs to be an understanding that these drawings come from the second century BC. This is during the period of Hellenization where there was a lot of mixing of Egyptian religion with other religious traditions. And so there's sort of this mixing of iconography that can happen in those situations.

that we know did happen in those situations. Even Jesus's story, for instance, about Abraham and the, I'm sorry, the Rich, Lazarus. Oh, shoot, I can't remember what it was from. In the story of Lazarus and the rich man, I think that's Luke 16. Yeah, that's what it is. There's a mixture, that's actually an Egyptian story that Jesus is utilizing, and he's using Abraham, for example, as he's actually replacing Osiris in the original story. So in the original story, Abraham isn't Abraham, it's Osiris, and Jesus is using an Egyptian story to tell

this, to give this parable. So there was a mixing of that. So the analogy I like to use to kind of explain this is imagine that you had a group of Christians that were living in India, and they began to use Hindu iconography to tell and Hindu iconography to tell Christian stories

so like let's say you have a boat and in it there's these 12 cows and Vishnu is walking on the water like you could see how a Christian would look at that and say this is the story of Vishnu right or I'm sorry this is the story of Jesus walking on the water but a Hebrew expert would look at

that and say, no, you got it wrong. That's Vishnu. So there's, that is one of the challenges that you run into when you're trying to, to analyze this, because you're not interpreting the text, you're interpreting sort of what are these drawings mean to the people that are looking at the drawings. Sure. So the Joseph Smith papyri that we have, that we know that Joseph Smith owned, and we know we're part of the, the papy collection from which he translated the book of Abraham, contains facsimile one. Like we have the actual facts that the image, this drawing that you're talking about.

We actually have one of these in the papyri that we know that Joseph Smith owned that we know did end up in the book of Abraham. That first facsimile is interpreted by Joseph Smith as depicting Abraham sacrificing Isaac. And I tell you what, we'll put it on screen so that people can see it. It actually isn't, it actually isn't Abraham sacrificing Isaac.

It is, it's a, it's the story of Abraham being sacrificed by the Egyptians or an attempt to sacrifice him, which actually is corresponding not only to the book of Abraham, but it also corresponds to ancient apocryphal works that Joseph Smith had no access to. Okay. Okay. So my mistake about what it represented there, but it does represent Abraham being sacrificed. That's what you say. Or tempting. Correct. Abraham, not Isaac. Correct. Now, Egyptologists interpret this as a standard Egyptian funerary scene known as a lion couch scene, right?

You also agree with that? And this depicts a deceased person being a balm or resurrection by the god Anubis. And again, yes, but I would also dispute that there is a great debate on

how standard this particular one is. So this is something that's actually pretty disputed, at least amongst Latterty Saint scholars. I'm not an Egyptologist here. So one of the challenges I have with this is I have to defer ultimately to experts in this field. But I know that there is some debate about how standard of a funerary text or I'm sorry, how standard this lion couch scene is. And also, a lion couch scene that would be normally typical could also be interpreted differently depending on the context, right?

So, it's a, it's a tough one because I don't, we don't know what, how the people that were looking at this image would have interpreted it specifically. There's a lot of assumptions that are being made about that. Okay, but so, in the book of Abraham chapter one, verse 12, so like right near the beginning, it says, and that you may know, and that you may have knowledge of this altar, something he was just describing, I will refer you. to the representation at the commencement of this record. In other words, referring people to the facsimile at the beginning of this record. So if we have the Joseph Smith papyri with the facsimile, and we know that that Joseph Smith papyri doesn't mention Abraham, then given that in the very first chapter of the book of Abraham,

it says, well, I'll refer you to the image at the beginning of this, of this text. surely we know that Joseph Smith is mistranslating this Egyptian papyrus, right? I would push back with this. I would say it doesn't necessarily mean that the text that's being translated refers to the same, like the images are part of the exact same text. So there is some disconnect there. With that in mind, there is another way people go. I am agnostic, by the way, on the two theories to account for the Book of Abraham.

Okay. There are two. One is that we were missing the papyri that he originally translated from. And with what you had just brought up, there is the theory is if you're going to go with the missing scroll theory, that this record at the beginning, the facsimile, that it doesn't necessarily have to be connected to the exact same papy that the record comes from. Okay. But then before talking about the second response here, does that mean that we're sort of supposed to believe on this? idea that like there is this text, this Egyptian record that begins with this inscription of Abraham, like a drawing, a facsimile of Abraham, and then is just like a random unrelated funerary text and then gives a biography of Abraham afterwards. Like it seems very strange to me that even if there was this missing papyrus that was part of this text, that I mean, it would make sense if like the thing that we discovered, oh, it wasn't the book of Abraham, but it was some kind of religious thing or some kind of, you know, priestly ordinance or something, but it is just

a standard Egyptian funerary text. It's like a sort of bog standard Egyptian text. And yet that is what I'm supposed to think is, was like the preface of the book of Abraham, you know, with the facsimile of Abraham being on top of that random funerary, right? This is also something that Joseph Smith himself could be interjecting into this an expansion of what the text is, you know, like he's interjecting his own commentary into this. So I don't, there are you text?

No, no, no, meaning like he's saying, refer to the record of the beginning of this. Oh, so that's Joseph Smith saying that maybe. That's sort of a Joseph Smith interjection. I'm not saying that is the case here. So the reality is here is that I agree that there are challenges that you have to deal with, right?

And there are other interpretations of this. This is a widely debated subject. I have a hard time with it because I don't have a strong position on the book of Abraham and exactly what theory best accounts for it. But I do know that one other theory is that it's a catalyst theory. This is that Joseph Smith himself was he found these and they inspired him to have a revelation that he believed was connected with these, but it wasn't, but the Lord still wanted to bring that forward. Now that has its own issues and things.

the catalyst theory. But what, so why not just, uh-huh. So carry on. I was just going to say, I was just going to say, like, why does anyone believe this, right? Like,

why would anyone not just write this off? Well, the book itself, again, within seven pages, has all sorts of really fascinating things that, if you're going to account for the reasons to doubt the book, you also need to account for the reasons to believe in it. Like, the book mentions the plains of Olisham.

And then after Joseph Smith's death, archaeologists discover an Akkadian ruler named Narim Sin, who refers to an area that essentially is referred to as the Plains of Olashem. I mean that the, so it has all of the phonetic. So in Hebrew, here's one of the challenges. In Hebrew, the vowels, like, they're not there in the script. It's just the consonants. So in other words, the best you can get when analyzing these things, are the consonants.

And so the consonants that Joseph has in this text match in the right place, in the right time and in the right location as an actual place in the Near East, like he hits it.

He talks about gods like Elkanah, shine ha. These again show up in actual ancient records from that time. Ancient

apocryphal stories Like, one of the big things that happens in the book of Abraham is that you have, Abraham is an astronomer who, whose father is an idolatry. And these are found in ancient apocryphal works that Joseph had no access to. So it's sort of, again, this argument from like, look, okay, I get that there's some challenges here, but I also want to turn to people and say, look, if you can't account for these other things, something weird is going on here. And what's funny is, is we don't even know that we have the source text for the book of Abraham. So, real quick, like, we do have the source text for another book that nobody ever talks about, and that is the book of Enig, which was found, by the way, part of the Dead Sea Scrolls has a bunch of inocic literature in it. Yeah.

Okay. And so it's sort of like, if anyone wants to talk about the book of Abraham, I always want to be like, yeah, that's fine. I'll acknowledge the challenges. But then I want to say, but why is it that the book of Enic, where we do have to be able to have the source text matches the translation that Joseph gave down into crazy details like the name Mahija like just yeah it's the name of heja just throw the one name in it so Joseph tell me about this Joseph Smith translating this text so the book of inic shows up in part of the pearl a great price known as the book of Moses it's sort of a rendering of the early or the book

of Genesis by Joseph Smith and as he renders it he as part of this rendering he doesn't have the actual text there. That's the other thing. He's like, you don't, Joseph provided renderings. The word translation is used, but the word rendering is probably better. He provides these renderings for the book of Abraham, which many people believe is a catalyst through the papyri. That's fine. I can accept that. But with Enoch, it's interesting because he says, I'm rendering excerpts from the prophecy of Enoch. And what happens is that there are all of these parallels. There's 22 different themes identified by scholars that correspond in crazy specific ways to the Book of Enoch that we've discovered since Joseph Smith. There was a one last thing

if I could just hit it. So what did he translate it from? He just received it by Revelation. Right. See, he received a Joseph, all of Joseph's translations were through Revelation. Okay. They weren't like he went through and like picked apart the text. Yeah, importantly, when he translated the book of Mormon, he didn't just read the golden plates. He put a sear stone, which is a kind of special stone inside of his hat, put his head into the hat, and then the stone sort of glowed or reflected words and that's what he read out. And we don't know exactly what was going on inside the hat, obviously. We know that the reports from those who were there said that he put translators inside of the hat, and then he would put his head inside of the hat, and then he would dictate the book of Mormon, which is crazy because he produces a. 17-item kaiasm that is absolutely beautiful with his head.

That's in Alma 36, right? Correct. Now, real quick, just the book of Venet thing as we're jumping around real quick. I just want to get this one out because I think it's super fascinating. Cirillo Salvatore is an expert on the book of, or on Inocque literature. And so he did a master's thesis on Joseph Smith's rendering of this text. And he said, he was looking at these parallels. And he said, individually, these parallels may appear small, but when viewed together and added to the variety of other parallels and substantial similarities and taken within context, these comparisons prove substantial similarities between the book of Enoch and Joseph's book of Moses, which is beyond dispute.

So he didn't even dispute. His whole paper is saying Joseph must have had the book of Enoch literature. Because the parallels were so powerful. So again, I want to say. That is possible that he could have just had access to inocic literature? That is a really debated topic because it didn't, I think the first inocic sort of translations into English that existed came in like 1821 and were in England. And so trying to connect this to a-

It's like just about plausible, but it's not like obviously the case. So, well, not until you get into some of the books that aren't part of first inic. There's later inocic literature that he has correspondences to that are not connected to what he produces. Regardless, I come away from this and I go, all right, you have reasons to doubt. But unless people also, and this is, everyone talks about the reasons to doubt. That's what's all online. Like, we get it. We've heard it a thousand times.

But nobody talks about the anarchic literature. Nobody talks about Nahom or undiscovered names or the immense sociological effects. Now, for an atheist, again, I can totally. see that there is this idea that this is um of course this is all false it's it's part of the religious craziness of religion but for a Christian there seems to be a double standard here where all the sudden I always tell people you want to get a Christian to start talking like an atheist bring up Mormonism and all the sudden witnesses don't matter and like you know archaeology is the only game in town

and all that kind of stuff. Right. I see what you mean. And I do think that is true. I think that's, it's an interesting thing to see. But at the same time, while there is a lot of interesting, potentially confirming evidence of Mormonism, for me, if there is an important enough fly in that ointment, it's enough to sort of bring the whole thing down like a house of cards. And you've got to understand how it sounds to me

to hear that you've got a guy who claims to translate some Egyptian hieroglyphics, we discover the papyri that he owned, it doesn't even remotely match. And then the response is kind of like, he probably, there was probably another bit that did have a biography of Abraham, or maybe he read this funerary text and somehow used that as a catalyst to, you know, get some revelation about the biography of Abraham's early life, you know. I fully know what you're saying and what that sounds like. Like, I don't, I'm not here saying the book of Abraham is the reason that I believe the

Joseph Smith story. It's on the side of the scale of reasons to doubt. It's one of, I would probably say, it's probably the baby. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. I mean, I fully acknowledge that. But I, but I have, this is a point of dispute that you had with Cameron Batutsi recently.

Do we have evidence that Joseph Smith, of Joseph Smith putting the text of the book of Abraham alongside hieroglyphics, attempting to sort of. of match up the hieroglyphics with the book of Abraham as we know, showing us that the pyroglyphic we know are wrong were connected to the book of Abraham that we have today. So what we have are known as the Egyptian alphabet and grammar document, which is a document that there was, see, it's a very complicated story because we know even before they got the Egyptian documents, W.W. Phelps, who was an associate of Joseph Smith, and also worked as described sometimes, along with some others, he was working on a sort of like reverse engineering

ancient texts to try and discover this undiscovered language, okay, this original human language. That was a project that he was involved in. And Joseph, to some extent, was certainly, I think, involved in that project. However, what we have is records, and again, there are, this is a whole rabbit hole you can go into with a lot of stuff, but the basic thing is W. W. W. W. Phelps was involved in this project, and we do have evidence that he was involved in taking the text from the book of Abraham and trying to revert what I believe was reverse engineer the rendering that Joseph gave through Revelation to try and connect it to his sort of project to try and figure out what this original human language is. And so anyone who wants to sort of account for this and say

Joseph Smith was the one who produced these documents, they have to deal with the fact that it is with the fact that Phelps was already involved prior to the translation of the book of Abraham in this sort of project to decode ancient languages. And so it's perfectly plausible in my mind to say that Phelps took what Joseph had rendered and then went back to see if he could figure out how to make it all work. So do we have the Book of Abraham in English with hieroglyphics attempting to match up next to it in Joseph Smith's handwriting?

No. What we do have is we have a document that Joseph is in Joseph's handwriting that takes some of the characters from it and then tries to decode them.

So you do have like in the document we're talking about people can watch my video on it. I released a video on this in response to Cameron Bertuzi is on the left hand side or you have Joseph Smith's handwriting. You have characters

that are from the papy that he has. but the things on the right-hand side aren't the book of Abraham. They are other things. We do later have a document in W.W. Phelps handwriting that has the book of Abraham

and some of these characters. But on the initial one, we don't. And as Cameron even said in his video, one of the problems with this, Joseph never claimed that he used some sort of secular method to give any of his translations. So why would he try and do this decoding work?

It seems much more plausible in the historical record, that what's going on here is that Joseph is assisting his friend W.W. Phelps and his pre-existing thing to try and see if they can take what he had received by revelation to try and reverse engineer the process. Yeah. Unfortunately, I just don't know enough about the evidence here of what texts we're looking at. I mean, in Cameron's video, he put something on screen and you respond and say, that's not actually the book of Abraham. And it's difficult for me to attempt to do. code. I'm sure that there will be people who can do a better job of that than me, but

it's something that's worth addressing. And also, as you recognize, this does cause a lot of people, a lot of, a lot of concern. And I can understand it because although, yeah, okay, doesn't, doesn't Joe, how many scrolls? How many, like, what does the the LDS church, like, own have in its collection, what it got from the Met in terms of the Joseph Smith papy? I'm not sure. I think it's, it's you have to look again i i i would joseph smith says and i don't want to try and dodge this as far as i'm aware jose smith says that there are two two scrolls and i'm not sure how much the there are there are had well no there there's talk of long scrolls and then fragments of

scrolls um i don't know again you're as you get deeper into the weeds on this i'm i'm just not the guy to do the full depth analysis into all of it. This is a rabbit hole that is as deep as you can go. And again, it's more for the sake of time than anything else because we are getting close here to my heart out. But what I want to say is that I fully acknowledge the book of Abraham can cause reasons for people to doubt. There are explanations that are given that I think provide a way to say this isn't a defeater. Like you said, if there's a fly in the ointment that's sufficiently big enough, it kind of wrecks the whole thing. Like, I agree with that. But I don't, I believe that there are ways to deal with it. But what there, I don't think people

do deal with are the other evidences that exist. And so the entire conversation ends up being about those things without dealing with these other things, right? Like, I could turn to you, Alex, right now, and I could say, explain why Joseph knew what Mahidja was, you know? Yeah. And I do it's in. And I could, and so, like, if you can't explain that, it's like, well, then there's no explanation.

Yeah. And that's worth people looking into for themselves. And also, I do want to flag these things. And I'd like to do a more in-depth episode on something like the Book of Abraham. but I also want to frame this as an introduction to Mormonism, right? Like I don't want people to necessarily come away from this thinking this has been some attempt at a debate or something. I'd be the last person on earth to ask to do that.

But worth pointing out, and if people, like, in the comments have, I'm sure, like, one of the top voted comments underneath this video is going to be some kind of response on this book of Abraham stuff. So please do discuss it down below. And if there's an ability, if there's time in the future, with somebody who really can set the record straight here. Maybe we can do an episode on the Book of Abraham. But it's just one point among many.

I said that there are a few more, and you're quite right. We're running out of time. So why don't we move on to talking about two other famous problems? First, until 1977. Oh, that's fine. Go ahead. I was going to say, I feel a little bit like, and I'm fine to talk about these controversies,

but I feel like there is a theological side to this that I think we haven't been able to hit on, unfortunately, which maybe we can do another time. But, you know, I'm fine to talk about the controversies, but if it's just like all that we talk about are the controversies, it does get a little, like... Yeah, we haven't even covered the beliefs in the getting the planet after you die and the nature of God and all of that kind of stuff.

We didn't even get into that. I think that, man, I get the feeling... Well, and that's fine. We can go into the controversy. You can continue with those. I have a feeling that that would want to do that proper. And that would require some, something in depth. It's a bit of a shame, but maybe we can revisit it and do something on actual Mormon theology, as opposed to.

I suppose this has been a history of Mormonism, let's say, a history of the belief, a history of Joseph. Yes, which, by the way, it is one of the things that I think people struggle with, right? Like, the history that's given of our church, like, if we went and did a history of Catholicism right now and went, through all of the things in Catholic history, there'd be a lot of stuff that you could talk about that would cause issues for people. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Absolutely. And I think you can do that with Protestantism as well.

So to say that there are historical challenges within our tradition, absolutely. People don't join it because of the historical tradition. Miracle claims are always something that are hard for people to believe. But ultimately, I think it's the theology and the effect that it has on people that is what drives people

to actually believe, especially if they come from a, they're seeking Jesus Christ. Yeah, I want to cover that, but I do think it probably needs its own room to breathe, but I would be remiss not to mention that until 1977, black people were banned

from participating in ordinances performed in LDS temples. Now, it's well known that black men were banned from the priesthood until 1978, one thing that I think isn't obvious to people, if they don't know about Mormonism and how it works, is that some temple ordinances are necessary in order to enter the highest level of heaven in Mormon theology. What this means is effectively, until 1977, black people were banned, not just from, you know, temple ordinances, which is bad enough, but

through this were also therefore banned from the highest level of heaven by the Mormon Church. This changes in 1978, and it's not until 2013 that the LDS Church finally disavows its previous teachings on race in general. So it does change its mind, but such a history of racism in the church is going to give a lot of people pause for thought as to whether this is the representative body of Christ on earth, especially if it's by their fruits that you shall know them. Yeah, no, and I'll be the first one to say that the ban is not anywhere found in our canon of scripture. It was a tradition that crept into the church primarily because of interpretations that came from Protestantism in the 1850s. Protestants had a very particular

view about ham and cane. I mean, So, yeah, is this something that we, I think that they just got wrong? Now, there are members of the church or people that will say that, you know, there might have been some reason for it. I don't, I don't believe that. But again, you know, Jesuits own slaves and participated in the slave trade. Protestants were like basically the group that was justifying slavery in the South. So it's like, the reality is everyone in history was racist. And that racism, unfortunately, did make its way into our tradition.

now with that in mind there never was an idea that they couldn't ever be saved at any time there always was in our theology that that blacks would eventually receive exaltation and all that stuff we believe in work for the work for people after the dead so it's never was like these people are automatically barred from the highest heaven forever and in my mind it's just it was a mistake i don't there's no no need to make a make up anything else about it Yeah, it's important to point out that, I mean, like, looking at like what Joseph Smith actually said and did, I think Joseph Smith sort of flip-flopped a bit on the issue of slavery, for example, throughout his life, eventually being an abolitionist by the time of his death. But I think he sort of went back and forth a bit, partly probably due to some of the political conflicts. Gosh, we also didn't mention the fact that he was assassinated in prison, did we?

There's so much to get into here. It's amazing. There's a whole thing. Joseph Smith is running for the presidency at the end. United States on on a campaign including such as the annexation of Texas and California. Just just one thing that people should know about Joseph's presidential run. It was not he did it in response because the president literally would do nothing when he had written to them about his people being exterminated and driven out. And so Joseph, it wasn't, Joseph never had any of these

sort of political aspirations until he was responding to the violence that was being enacted against his people and his platform was to free the slaves that was one of his to sell the lands in the west and free the slaves it was to reform prisons uh so that they could be centers of rehabilitation less punitive things um and he also wanted to stop sort of the mob violence and vigilanteism that was really prevalent in the united states at that time and so yes joseph smith did uh run for president on that sort of a platform. Didn't Brigham Young himself believe that the curse of ham in Genesis did extend a curse generationally through to black people in?

Yeah, that was the, that was the, and that's an old Protestant. If you look at the hermetic hypothesis and the ideas of Cain, a lot of Latter-day Saints came into our tradition early on, you know, still holding on to the ideas of their, kind of their old lens that they had. Um, nothing in our canon of scripture kind of says that. In fact, the book of Mormon very clearly, uh, speaks that all people are alike unto God. Um, yes. And so, yeah, I mean, I look at it as, I mean, if you want to compare other Christian groups and say that there's racism that existed amongst our people and even amongst leadership, like, sure. That, that exists. So. And Joseph Smith's, assassination. No excuse on that. I'm going to tell the story of Joseph Smith's assassination and you tell me if I've got this about, right. Joseph Smith is a polygamist. He has multiple wives, which is a problem for many people as well about Mormonism. Multiple wives, but not multiple husbands. In doctrine and covenants 132, Joseph Smith seems to indicate that this is an eternal law, that at least those marriages to multiple wives will exist eternally in heaven, even though the church then did do away with polygamy. Let me, let me, let me, who said that it was an eternal thing, that it was always to be the thing? I think that might need a correction.

Doctrine of 132. So I don't think about. So, so that, that actually is not the, the eternal marriage is something that is necessary. Plural marriage, there have been leaders who thought that it was, but that it was some sort of a requirement, some sort of a higher law that we all had to live in order to receive the highest celestial glory. that is not the position of the church, and nor was it during Joseph Smith's lifetime. You have the people that actually very clear that Joseph did not teach that it was a requirement for exaltation. So it seems to me. And real quick, just on the polygamy thing.

In chapter, in verse 52, it commands Emma, who's Joseph Smith's first wife, to receive all of those that Joseph takes as additional wives. verse 54 then states that she'll be destroyed if she doesn't, you know, bind herself to Joseph. There's this weird thing where it sort of says that the Lord will destroy Emma, the first wife of Joseph, if she doesn't follow this command. It sort of seems to imply that she needs to be accepting of Joseph's polygamy, otherwise she will be destroyed. Yeah, and I guess that's kind of a different situation. I'm talking about the, that it's necessary for exaltation. Here, let me clear thing up, because a lot of people might not know our position on polygamy. If you are, if you, if I entered into a plural marriage and took on an additional wife right now as a latter-day saint, I would be excommunicated from the church.

The church's position right now is the same as St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas said that polygamy doesn't, like, violate the natural law. He said that it could at sometimes be justified. The book of Mormon and Jacob II condemns it. It says, for behold, behold, I the Lord, have seen the sorrow on the morning of my daughters, and these hordoms are an abomination to me, for there shall not any man among you have, save it be one wife. So the book of Mormon actually condemns polygamy, but it does make this little caveat.

It says, for if I will raise up seed unto me, I will command my people, otherwise you shall hearken under these things. In other words, monogamy is the norm in Latter-day Saint theology. We just can account for biblical polygamy by saying that God has at times authorized plural marriage. He did in the Bible. You know, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, two of those three were polygamists. So, as strange as it being sound, I actually find this.

Yes, sorry. You find it to be. Oh, go ahead. You said you were going to, you find it to be what? I actually find it weirdly to be a strength, that we actually account for plural marriage in the Bible in a way that no other Christian group does. Oh, I see. Yeah. Again, looking at what's actually in the Bible and seeing what best accounts for it. Maybe Mormonism scores a point here, too. I know you've got a hard out. You've got to go. It's clear that there's more to say. I was going to sort of tell the story of Joseph Smith getting assassinated broadly. Like a newspaper criticizes him for his polygamy. He's the governor of the town. at the time. He shuts down the newspaper. They protest, start a riot. He flees. He comes back because the governor of Missouri says, is it Missouri? No. Where is he at that point? No, it's Illinois at

the time. I have enough time to just sum this up quickly. Okay. Yeah. So tell me, tell me if I'm about right here. He says this newspaper needs to be banned. He flees because of the ensuing riots. He comes back. He goes to prison to face trial because he institutes martial. law as governor to quell these riots. Then he flees. Then he comes back to face justice. And while he's in prison, an angry mob come to the prison, shoot his brother, shoot him, and he falls out of a window, and then he hits the floor, and they shoot him again. And that's how he dies. Correct. More or less, there's a lot to be told about that story. Some people characterize it as a shootout as a local jail because somebody had smuggled in Joseph a pistol. When Joseph and his brother were up against the

door with their friends trying to hold the mob back that was trying to kill them. They began shooting through the door and Joseph's brother took a bullet to the face. Once Joseph went to his brother's side and held his brother as he died, he did then pull out the pistol and shoot back. But he couldn't stop the mob and they broke in and killed him. So I don't know if I characterize that as a shoot out at the OK corral or something. It sounds to me like a mob came and killed him and he tried to defend himself and his friends, and I don't have any problem with that. If someone shoots my brother in the face and I shoot back,

I don't think I'm the bad guy. Yeah. Like I say, this is while he's running for president. So the first U.S. presidential candidate to be assassinated in those United States. What is obvious here, Jacob, is that there is a lot more to say. And perhaps I'll have to have you back on to talk about the actual theology, maybe a bit more about Smith and polygamy and his own polygamous practices and a bit more about the story of his death and whatnot.

But hopefully this has been enough to market. this is something of an introduction to Mormonism for people who didn't know anything about it before. So thank you so much for your time. It's been a good episode. Thanks. And one last word I just want to say to people that we brought up some things that obviously will cause people to, you know, things that are the reasons that we also doubt as Latter-day Saints. I don't want to ever say that these challenges and controversies don't exist. But the reason that Latter-day Saints do exist is there are actually a lot of reasons to believe that people don't talk about. And ultimately the spiritual power of this is what pushes us over the line. I'm a Latter-day Saint

ultimately because of the way that it has affected my life personally. You, Alex, have said that it's a religious experience that would ultimately convince you. I like to use the analogy of music. Music, I can't explain to you in words, but you have to just come and hear it and listen to it. And that's kind of what I want to invite people to do is to take that time to actually get to know us. You can get to know these stories and the controversies, get to know the evidence on either side of it. But at the end of the day, I think if you're seeking Jesus Christ, if that's really what you're doing, you will find something powerful here. It has changed millions of people's lives and it's deeply affected my own. And so I just want to kind of leave that

is my final thing on this. Well, thanks. I wish we had more time to talk about. I'd love to know which of the doubts, like, personally moved you the most. I mean, without any, like, explanation of the things we've talked about, it's, is there something we've talked about today that for you is personally the most challenging objection to Mormonism, not like for Mormons in general, but for you personally, like which one it is that you've thought about the most and wrestled with the most? Well, the book of Abraham is definitely high up there.

You were right to bring that one up. That is a real challenge. But again, I could, we could do a whole episode on the evidence for. And I think that when people, like, you have to account for all of this. I ultimately, I think that argument to absurdity, it's like something happened here. Something remarkable happened. And to simply find one thing that is a challenge and throw all the rest out, I think is, it doesn't fully account for the data.

It's being very, very sort of selective. And so while there are things that cause me to doubt even personally, I'm a normal person, it is all of these other things that people often never talk about that hopefully we can talk more about in another episode. I hope so too. Jacob Hansen, thanks for your time. Links will be in the description, et cetera. It's been a good one. If you enjoyed that conversation, you might like my previous episode with Justin Sledge on the Origins of Yahweh.

You can watch it by clicking the link on your screen. To support the channel and get early, add free access to video. subscribe to my substack at alex o'connor.com thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one