Welcome and Guest Introduction

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your hosts for this evening. I am John Dehlin, and I am here in studio. She's back. The one, the only, Carah Burrell. Hey, Carah.

Carah Burrell [00:00:14] Hello.

John Dehlin [00:00:15] Welcome back to Mormon Story Studios.

Carah Burrell [00:00:17] Thanks, John Dehlin. So nice to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:19] It's good to have you back.

Carah Burrell [00:00:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:00:21] How's life been? How have they been going?

John Larsen [00:00:23] Great.

Carah Burrell [00:00:23] Spending lots of time with my family, traveling, doing lots of content with Sam Shelley, Z on the shelf, doing my Patreon, and everything's been really fun.

John Dehlin [00:00:31] Your patreon's almost at 300, and I think we should have a goal that by the end of this podcast, there's 300 people that sign up for your patreon. What do you say?

Carah Burrell [00:00:41] That'd be nice. I'm hovering around the 290 mark.

John Dehlin [00:00:44] How do they find it? How do they find it?

Carah Burrell [00:00:45] Patreon.com Nuanceo all right, and what do you.

John Dehlin [00:00:49] What are you hoeing about these days? Like what, what videos? What video? What. What videos are you.

Carah Burrell [00:00:53] I actually do have a vlog from Sal and Lena's wedding. I don't know if you saw that. I just went back to California. You guys remember Salina, our lesbian couple that had an amazing Mormon Stories episode, and I went down to California for their wedding and it's called the vlog I should not be posting. So every once in a while I'll have some revelations of my own in some of my videos, but mostly it's just kind of my YouTube videos. And it just people can give me five bucks and help me, support me, and that just replaces my income here. And I get to go do my own stuff and talk about the things that I'm passionate about on more of like a free will and fancy free basis.

John Dehlin [00:01:24] You and Sam did one on free will recently. You and I have a series on top 15 things super popular. Never told you.

Carah Burrell [00:01:31] Yeah, that video is awesome. So John and I are recording a second part to that this week.

John Dehlin [00:01:35] On Thursday.

Carah Burrell [00:01:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:01:36] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [00:01:36] So I've got lots of guests, whoever else in this, like, kind of post Mormon community. I've got a bunch of friends who are probably just doing content with. I went down to St George last week and did a video with Bill Real about absurdities and Mormonism that was super popular. So it's just fun. I got lots of cool friends who are willing to make content with me and I'm just honored. And so there's a good amount of people who support it. So.

John Dehlin [00:01:55] And you said you're going to be streamyarding soon. Live streaming, Right?

Carah Burrell [00:01:57] I have a live Stream tomorrow at 11. A Q A. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:02:02] All right.

Carah Burrell [00:02:03] I learned everything I need to know here. Just fiddle around, press some buttons, say nonsense, and it'll go swell. But I'm just honored to do this episode. I love talking about the stuff we did last time with John Larsen. I. I thought that was the most epic episode ever.

John Dehlin [00:02:16] Oh, my gosh. John Larsen. Well, you haven't even brought John on yet. But we did the Plan of Salvation with John Larsen last time. Hey, John Larsen. How's it going?

John Larsen [00:02:23] Hey, guys.

John Dehlin [00:02:24] It's good to have you, brother. Good. Dude, that episode on the Plan of Salvation was amazing.

John Larsen [00:02:29] Yeah, it was a little sweary. Probably should have taken my foot off the gas a little bit.

John Dehlin [00:02:34] Well, I guess so.

Carah Burrell [00:02:35] Funny.

John Dehlin [00:02:35] Well, I guess we should let people know that traditionally Mormon stories tries to keep things PG rated. But when John Larsen's in the house, and I could I say cara barrels in the house, like, there may be a swear or two. So if you've got kids in the room or if you're sensitive to a swear word now and again, you know, act accordingly. But we're not going to let a few swear words get in the way of wisdom and truth. That's right. Spoken by John and Carah.

Carah Burrell [00:03:05] We can get you guys in the. Like in the waters. Make it a little bit easier, more accustomed to. We just start. We'll start doing offensive gestures for first, and then we'll move on to words. Let's go.

John Dehlin [00:03:15] Some people listen because of the profanity, by the way.

Carah Burrell [00:03:18] And some people are waiting for the gestures.

John Larsen [00:03:20] Hey, when do we get a pimp out my Patreon account?

John Dehlin [00:03:23] All right, John, you're next, brother.

John Larsen [00:03:25] Yeah. Yeah. So. So mine is lack of nuance. Ho. At Patreon.

Carah Burrell [00:03:29] Not for long.

John Larsen [00:03:31] No. I'm just kidding. I don't have one. All right, John, how's your local library?

John Dehlin [00:03:35] Dude? How's Oregon? How's Oregon going?

John Larsen [00:03:38] That's good. It's been. We've had a wet, cold spring. I think it's the coldest, wettest april since like 1880. Something the other.

Carah Burrell [00:03:47] Holy moly.

John Dehlin [00:03:48] So that's weird because it's like, super hot and dry here. Except for today.

Carah Burrell [00:03:52] Except for today and yesterday and the day before.

John Dehlin [00:03:54] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:03:54] Yeah. Aren't you guys supposed to get a big snowstorm or something?

John Dehlin [00:03:58] I don't know. I don't. I don't even know.

Carah Burrell [00:03:59] I'm just saying John hasn't left this room in days.

John Dehlin [00:04:02] I don't leave. We just finished that episode and I'm starting the next one, like with a

Carah Burrell [00:04:06] two minute pee break. Let's go. Tower of Tower of Babel.

John Larsen [00:04:09] We.

John Dehlin [00:04:10] We scheduled seven interviews this week. Carrie, you'd be ashamed of me. Can you believe seven in one week? That's just insane.

Carah Burrell [00:04:16] Why did you leave more stories? I don't know. I kind of felt like seeing my kids every once in a while. It was kind of a dumb thing, but whatever.

John Dehlin [00:04:23] Oh man. All right, time to change the subject awkwardly. All right, so the topic for today is Tower of Babel, and I'm just curious how you kind of came up with that and, and what led to you wanting to pick that of all the topics you could pick.

Introducing the Tower of Babel Topic

John Larsen [00:04:37] Good question. Well, the Tower of Babel is a. Or Babel or however you want to say it.

John Dehlin [00:04:42] Oh, we'll say however you want is

John Larsen [00:04:43] an interesting story, first of all, and we'll get back to that in a second. But it is part of the foundational split off where Mormonism comes from. We have the Bible and through Revelation or whatever. Joseph Smith pointed out several points where the Bible split and launched new civilizations and new avenues spin offs as they were in the. In the. In the multiverse of. Of the Bible. The weak fan fiction maybe we might want to call it. But. So the Tower of Babel is one of the key split off points and is paramount to the truth claims of the Book of Mormon. On the Tower of Babel, I believe the Book of Mormon's truth claims rest. So I think it's interesting to look at this little story.

John Dehlin [00:05:33] You could almost say that both the Bible and the Book of Mormon depend on the Tower of Babel. I'm going to switch to say, Babel now for you. You can almost say both the Bible and the Book of Mormon's authenticity or veracity, at least from a historical perspective, rests on that bedrock. Right?

John Larsen [00:05:50] Well, I think it's a great jump in point. I want to review the Bible and we can answer that question. First of all, just because I know people coming out of the LDS Church have been indoctrinated to read the King James Version, which has problems. I recommend. There's several versions. I recommend either the the new International version or my favorite is the New Revised Standard Version and I use the Oxford Annotated Bible as my Bible of preference. It is academic, well noted, and very well translated. So first of all, if you're going to study the Bible, I suggest you get one that you can actually read and not one that's in strange Forms of English we don't use anymore.

John Dehlin [00:06:32] A believing Mormon, they'll actually get a more accurate Bible if they read that version. Right.

John Larsen [00:06:39] Than their own King James. Yeah. And I'm not even saying you have to. You know, if it's this bridge too far for you to give up Your King James 1, I would say have your King James Bible there and have this one open near it. So when you're confused by the King James English, you can look at a regular Bible and say, oh, that's what they're trying to say. Because, you know, sometimes King James uses metaphor that we don't bother to unwrap, that we have just left for, for, for eons. And sometimes that metaphor is Greek metaphor, sometimes it's English metaphor, sometimes it's Hebrew metaphor. And you kind of have to be a language scholar to even get through the King James Bible. My background here, you know, I studied linguistics. That was my undergraduate degree, linguistics and anthropology. And, and I won't touch the King James Bible. I mean, I'll look at it every once in a while, but I just assume I don't understand anything going on in there.

John Dehlin [00:07:27] Okay. All right, well, with that, where, where, where should we begin?

Genesis as Ancient Origin Myth

John Larsen [00:07:35] All right, so the Book of Genesis is what is a collection of what we call origin myths. Every major world religion that disappears into the fog of time has these. And they're, they're the stories that appear in the first sections of their scripture that kind of explain how we got here, where everything came from, where God came from, you know, Pandora opening the box and all of humanity comes out, those kind of stories. And this story of the Tower of Babel would definitely be classified as an origin myth. And, you know, I, I, I said that the Book of Mormon relies on this being literally true, the Tower of Babel. And you suggested, John, that the Bible or biblical belief does too. I, I don't think that's the case. I, I think that for any kind of nuanced believer, even in, in any world religion, when you look at these origin myths, they're really so laced in metaphor that really the concreteness of them doesn't matter very much. So if you're a believer that God sent his only begotten son to die for our sins so we could all be redeemed, whether or not the Tower of Babel happened at all, if it was a regional thing or if it's global, I don't know that for modern Christianity or Christianity in general, it hinges on the truthfulness of this. Now, of course, you have a lot of Christians, especially fundamentalists and, you know, American fundamentalists, Christians wandering around saying about their biblical Christians, they believe everything in the Bible. They're going to have problems with stuff like this. But I, I want to challenge you a little bit by saying, you know, Christian theology or to be a good Christian, you have to believe this story. I don't think that's true.

John Dehlin [00:09:19] Yeah, I think, I think what I was, I think what I was kind of trying to say is the historicity of the Bible, some might say it hinges on the veracity of the Tower of Babel claim. Just because the Tower of Babel, as we'll get into, claims to be the origin of all the different languages and, but, but yeah, I think you're. I totally agree with you, John Larsen, that for many people, the idea even 500 years ago of taking the Bible literally or even looking at the Bible as necessarily a historical document versus a set of myths was preposterous even 500 or thousand years ago. So there's a long tradition of people looking to the Bible as myth and as a moral book and as a source of inspiration, not as a historical text per se. Yeah, for sure.

John Larsen [00:10:13] Until, until the printing press, the Bible was really only available to an elite group of basically monks, people trained to read it. People who read it very directed. You know, they would have had tutors and trainers and, and whatever that it was a very rare person who just could read the Bible on their own. You'd have to be very, very wealthy to have one prior to the printing press and even after that for a while. So I, I think for most of the history of the Bible, it just was never used or considered as it is now. So the, the question of the foundations of the biblical stories being true was missing from, from, you know, the first 1600 years of Christianity. It just wasn't a relevant question. So it's, it's really a modern construction that we're putting on on this book and that, and we probably say that for the Hindu vitas and the, the, the Buddhist sutras and, and, you know, some of those, those things like they were trying to use them historically the way they were never really intended to be used. And I don't think these religions themselves tend to insist in this, you know, modern historical accuracy of these things being absolutely true. I think that's, that's something that's more and more modern.

John Dehlin [00:11:33] Got it. Okay, what's next?

John Larsen [00:11:37] Okay, so you did bring up a good point. If you actually add the time together in the Bible now, we're not going to go deep into Bible scholarship about when the whole thing was written. But scholars kind of tend to believe that the majority of the Bible was compiled and written about 800 BC around about that time frame. And when they wrote it, they put in time periods and they put in ages. And so you can go and add up the genealogies of the Bible and you can look up when historical events happened or when the Bible identifies. And of course, in the book of the revelation of St. John at the end of our New Testament, it goes a little bit further and it identifies that there's these seals. And you know, the common belief even before Joe Smith was these were a thousand years, which led to like a 6,7000 year temporal existence of the planet. So for fundamentalist Christians, they believe that the planet is roughly 6,000 years old. Was it Bishop Shelby, sprung or no, not sprung, whoever it was that did it, who went back and decided that the world was formed on like October 31, 4004 BC at 9:00am something like that. You can look it up on the, on the, on the Internet. But using that kind of logic, we place this story happening about 4200 years ago. About 2200 BCE is. If you take the Bible's time frame of when they're saying this happened, then that is the time that it happened.

Carah Burrell [00:13:15] Okay, and quick question you're talking about. The time frame wasn't like the Noah's flood just like 100 years before the Tower of Babel.

John Larsen [00:13:26] Noah's flood was a few hundred years before the Tower of Babel.

Carah Burrell [00:13:29] Yes. And so technically they went from like seven people. I'm sorry, just sometimes when you look closely at the Bible, you're like, hey, this whole thing is kind of falling apart. They went from seven people probably, I guess, after Noah's flood to 10,000 people or whatever that would have taken to start building that. And that just the mathematics alone is just. That's kind of interesting to me that, that story.

John Larsen [00:13:47] Yeah. I mean, if you accept, if you accept Noah's flood as literal and you know that somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, this boat settled on top of a mountain somewhere and these people came out, however many there were, you know, at least Noah and his three sons and presuming they have wives. So you got like eight people, maybe, maybe more. And then you're going to populate the whole world. Yeah, that's it. It's problematic on many levels. We'll, we'll get back into that in a second here.

Reading and Unpacking the Tower of Babel Story

Carah Burrell [00:14:15] All right, take us to your next spot.

John Larsen [00:14:18] So, so if you follow the book, they kind of settle in the land around the Fertile Crescent. And the, the, the, the Bible actually doesn't refer to it as the Tower of Babel. It doesn't name it that way. It says they called it that way because, because the, the word that it references in Hebrew in the Bible is, I have it here in my notes, blah, blah, blah. Babel. It's, it's, it's b, it's Balal is the, is the Hebrew word which means a jumble or a confusion. And so that's, that's where that term comes from. And, and Babylon is, is derived from that same thing too, scholars guess. I mean, when we have the Bible, we, we have it and we have whatever versions of it we can find. It's not like we have a lot of 4000 year old commentaries on the Bible. So there's a lot of, you know, careful study and conjecture, son. It's, it's, it's, it's real scholarship, but oftentimes there's big gaps and big presumptions that need to be made. Okay, so we're going to go into your Old Testament if you want to follow along. This isn't very much of it to chapter 11 is where the magic begins.

John Dehlin [00:15:32] Chapter 11, Genesis. Chapter 11.

John Larsen [00:15:34] This is the book of Genesis, chapter 11. Okay. The story of the tower of, of, of Babel. And there, the story, the story places the city and the tower. It always talks about the city and the tower. We're in the east, so I'm assuming this is east of the kingdom of Palestine and all that kind of stuff somewhere in the Babylonian Assyrian Empire over there. And there are scholars who try to associate a particular building or a particular archaeological site with this. We just don't have any digs that we've come up with. Where there's a big building, it's chiseled on there. This was the Tower of Babel. Okay, so the first sentence, this is, this is, this is where we really get those foundational myths because they're usually trying to solve some problem like why do we have men and women? Or why is there evil in the world? Or why is there darkness and light? Or why is the moon separate from the sun? Well, the, this story opens up with the phrase, now the whole earth had one language and the same words. Okay, so we're really establishing the importance of this story. Okay, are, is everyone with me at this time? The Bible says there was one language and, and, and all the people were together. Right.

John Dehlin [00:16:53] I think Joseph would have called this The Adamic language, right?

John Larsen [00:16:57] Yes. Or, well, the Lamanite language. Well, I guess. I don't. I don't know. What. Yeah, the pure Adamic whatever it is. Okay, so. So, right. We're. We're. We're in agreement that the Bible says.

John Dehlin [00:17:10] Yep. One language.

John Larsen [00:17:11] One language. So I have a problem with Bible believers. Let's. Let's divert for just a minute. Okay. I think there's only four types of people who read the Bible. You ready for the four categories?

John Dehlin [00:17:28] Ready.

John Larsen [00:17:29] The biggest category is, of course, the people who've never read it but say they have, so they've just never really read it. Maybe they've heard some stuff in Sunday school. They've never actually picked it up and read the damn book. Okay, Then there are those who have read it and say, oh, my God, this is terrible. I'm leaving the church. Right. That's second category of people. There's third category of people who read it and then lie about what's in there constantly. And there's a fourth category of people who are just not very smart. They've read it, but they don't understand what they're reading. As far as I could tell, those are the only four possibilities. So if you're a believer, you either have never actually read the book, you're a liar, or you're not very smart.

John Dehlin [00:18:10] Oh, man. Okay.

Carah Burrell [00:18:13] Mormon stories welcomes all different belief systems.

John Larsen [00:18:16] Yeah, yeah, I welcome all those people. I mean, you know, but. But. But there's.

John Dehlin [00:18:21] What if you're just. I guess there's people who employ motivated reasoning due to confirmation bias.

John Larsen [00:18:27] So we're at Genesis, chapter 11, verse one, right?

John Dehlin [00:18:31] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:18:33] For those in their book. Okay, I want you to turn a page backwards to chapter 10.

John Dehlin [00:18:41] Okay.

John Larsen [00:18:41] Everybody. Everybody with me?

John Dehlin [00:18:43] I'm. I'm there.

John Larsen [00:18:44] Okay, we're gonna skip to verse five. This is. Remember, one chapter prior to the chapter of the Tower of Babel, we're gonna go to chapter 10, verse 5.

John Dehlin [00:18:53] Do you want me to read it?

John Larsen [00:18:55] Yeah, would you. Would you read that for us, Brother Dehlin?

John Dehlin [00:18:59] I hope I'm reading the right thing. What I'm reading is, it says, from these. The maritime peoples spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each with its own language.

John Larsen [00:19:13] Yeah. And so for in. In my version, it says, from these, the coastal coastland people spread. They are the descendants of Japheth in their lands with their own language, by their families in their nation. Okay, so. So what we're reading here is that the preceding verses are the descendants of Shem Ham And Japheth, chapter 10 is the genealogy of what happened after the flood. Right. And it goes down to Japeth. And Japeth's people went out to the islands. These would be like the Mediterranean islands. And we know that they were japeish people because they had their own language. It says right there in the Bible, chapter verse five. Okay, so our. The. The first task here, ostensibly for me, is to kind of prove that the. The. The Tower of Babel is not true. Well, I just did it right there with the Bible. Chapter 11, verse 1 says everyone spoke the same language. Chapter 10, verse 5 said they had different languages. The Bible doesn't agree with the Bible. How do you believe the Bible? Yeah, this is. This is the problem that. This is why I go back to that either people read these verses and they don't understand them. That can be. Or they read them and they're like, verse five is inconvenient. So I'm gonna lie about that and say that it's not there, that everybody spoke the same language in chapter 11. Or I just don't understand it. Help me believers understand how you guys are always hammering on that we need to read the Bible and understand the Bible when the Bible doesn't even say anything coherent. You guys have any tips for me?

Carah Burrell [00:21:00] I swear, if I said that to my mom, she'd be like, you'll find out when we die. We'll find out later. Just keep going. Just stop talking about it.

John Larsen [00:21:08] Sure. Why read the book at all? Let's just wait till. Let's wait till they roll the reel.

Carah Burrell [00:21:12] You know, we can see all feeling here. And don't look at it if it makes you uncomfortable. That's the devil.

John Dehlin [00:21:17] What I'm thinking of is our interviews with David Bacavoy where he acknowledges

John Larsen [00:21:22] that

John Dehlin [00:21:22] the Bible is put together. I mean, even the Mormon Church teaches the Bible is put together in such a fraught way that it's not totally reliable. We've been doing a series, John Larsen, with a guy named. Well, he has a website called LDS Discussions, and we talk about the long ending of Mark. I don't know if people know this, but even the last chapter of Mark kind of like gets like eight or nine verses in, and then it reboots and it starts over, and it's a different ending within the same chapter. And you just realize there are. There are problems all through. Or the. Or the. The account of the creation. Aren't there, like two or three different accounts of the creation just in the first few chapters of Genesis?

John Larsen [00:22:07] According To David, there's basically four, but there's two main ones. And once you're shown the two ones that interweave through the book of Genesis, you can't unsee it very well. Yeah, they. They tell two different stories. There's two different timelines. I mean, even in Noah's flood, there's two different stories, and in that chapter, there's two different lengths of time. And that. That. That's. You know, I'm. I know I'm being a little facetious here, but I. I'm being serious. I've got a lot of people around me in the United States right now. In the United States right now, the drumbeats of Christian nationalism are getting louder and. And louder and louder. It's creeping into Supreme Court decisions. There are people openly saying. Openly in office and running for office, saying, Christian nationalism. And I want you guys who are believers to know we have a problem in that you're insisting to use a book that contradicts itself. So what believers do is they just reach in here and pull the little bits they want out of there. And it becomes very difficult for people like me to even engage, because, just like Carah, you were saying they will deny immediately. I was looking through every church publication I could find that was online to see currently, you know, what they're saying about this. Everything that's out there just assumes the Tower of Babel. Although the church doesn't spend a lot of time on it. There aren't as many entries about it as there are other subjects it's just assumed to be true. And. And. But there's all this stuff going out to children's and children's publications and adult publications. They all just insist that this story is true, and they will repeat verse 11, ignoring verse 10, 5, that we know there were already other languages in the world.

Carah Burrell [00:23:53] Do you know this is its own actual, like, Sunday school lesson and, like, LDS curriculum? Like, they would dedicate a whole Sunday school lesson to it.

John Larsen [00:24:03] They might. I didn't. I didn't. I was. I didn't look to see if that was the case, but.

Carah Burrell [00:24:07] Because that's. I always find that really interesting because there'll be ones like, one of my last Sundays at church was about Jonah and being in the whale, talking about it literally. And me and my husband were like, our shelf is about to fall if we don't start getting some, like, hypothetical talk. And I'm just wondering how much the church is like, really? I don't know. There's just so many of these different ones. We Got enough shelf items. We need to be adding some, like, nuance and more like, let's talk about this as if it's just a good lesson. Not if it's like all of the Book of Mormon hinges on it, which is what Mormonism does. Right? So.

John Larsen [00:24:37] Well, I have a theory about modern Mormon doctrine.

Carah Burrell [00:24:40] Hit me.

John Larsen [00:24:41] And this is the Schrodinger's cat theory of doctrine. Right now, what the Church wants is before they have to make an official pronouncement of all this stuff that's out there floating like a dark cloud over Cincinnati or whatever, they, they, they. It's both true and not true simultaneously. Every talk in the Ensign, every book that's ever been published, they are both true and not true until the Church makes a statement. And the last thing they want to do is make an official statement about things. They just want things to disappear. They don't really like going and saying, okay, we are now withdrawing the miracle forgiveness because we no longer believe the book. Because the guy who was the prophets here and revelated around the church for a long time didn't know what the hell he was talking about. They don't want to say that. They just, they just want to disappear. They want it to be both true and not true simultaneously and never have to deal with it. And if you look at, whenever they're asked hard questions, what they're doing is it's a, it's a full press, full court press to not answer the question. You know, they just, they just don't want to deal with it. They'll say, oh, things will be dealt with in the future, or you just have faith or you just have to feel things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and you can point out to them in black and white in very simple things right here out of the gate, I'm showing you in the Bible where this story is not true according to the Bible, but they just don't want to deal with it. They don't want to think about it.

John Dehlin [00:26:05] Got it? Yeah. Cognitive dissonance is not fun. And so we find ways to manage cognitive dissonance sometimes by ignoring Maven. Maven's joined us and she made the point that she read the Bible, but she just ignored the hard stuff. Kind of tried to pretend it didn't exist, you know.

John Larsen [00:26:23] Well, here's a joyful thing for you ex Mormons and soon to be ex Mormons. You can go back and reread the Bible with, you know, your, your eyes wide open. It's really kind of a fun book. But There's. Go read Genesis. Don't bother with Exodus. Read the new test. Read the Gospels, read the Revelation. That's fun. Read like Lamentations and Jeremiah and Isaiah and skip all the rest. Oh, Song of Solomon's good.

John Dehlin [00:26:49] I was going to say. What about Song of Salt and Bro.

John Larsen [00:26:52] Yeah, and the Proverbs. I mean, there's. There's some good parts in there, but most of it is just trash. Oh, okay.

John Dehlin [00:26:58] Hey, really quickly, John, tell us which version of the Bible you're reading again so that those who want to follow along. I think I'm in the wrong type translation.

John Larsen [00:27:05] Yeah, I use the New Revised Standard version.

John Dehlin [00:27:08] New Revised Standard. Okay.

John Larsen [00:27:10] And I happen to use the Oxford Annotated, but if you type in nvs, NRSV into one of the things, I would also recommend the niv, the new International Version. Those are the two that I recommend.

John Dehlin [00:27:22] Okay. I just want to be in the same one that you're in. So I'm. I'm getting in there now. Okay. All right, John.

John Larsen [00:27:28] All right.

John Dehlin [00:27:29] Take us, Take us to the next place. Oh, really quickly.

John Larsen [00:27:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:27:32] Huge shout out. Thanks to Alan Lat, who made a super chat. We, We. We want. We like to pay John and Carah for their expertise. So we're really grateful for those who support us financially. We. One way to do that is through Super Chats. And Alan writes, I like paying my tithing in this manner without the gray envelope and carbon paper. So, Alan, thanks for the super chat. We really appreciate the support. Anybody else, you can support us through Super Chat. And you can also go to MormonStories.org Mormon expression and become a monthly donor to support John and Carah. All right, John, keep going.

John Larsen [00:28:11] Hey, I had a. I had a donor back in the day of the Mormon expression who would send his. His monthly donation in the blue envelopes, the blue tithing envelopes every time. And, and hey, you're welcome to do that every time. The deacons bring them by. You can write Mormon stories on there, send it to John Dehlin, and you take one more blue envelope out of circulation. All right, let's. Do you process blue envelopes, John? Do they still use blue envelopes? I don't even know.

John Dehlin [00:28:37] I wouldn't. I wouldn't know either. I'm assuming they. They do. Old habits die hard sometimes.

John Larsen [00:28:42] John will take your cash and your checks. All right, let's go through the rest of the story. Okay. Now, the whole earth had one language in the same words. So at that time, we all spoke the same thing. And they migrated from the east and came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And by the way, other versions say migrated to the east, but that's okay. And they said to one another, come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly. So they're going to make bricks. And they had bricks for stone and bitium for mortar. Now, one of the sources of the church that I read today, it was a 2018 source. And they went in great depth about using bidium as a. As a construction material. Yes, you can. It's like a mortar made of tar and some other stuff, and it works. And, you know, it just. It just. They spend all their capital on explaining this minor detail in this story shows that they don't oftentimes have much to stand on. All right, so what verse.

John Dehlin [00:29:47] What verse are you in your chapter? Chapter 11?

John Larsen [00:29:51] Yeah, I'm in chapter 11. The idium is verse three. Okay, so, okay, verse three, verse four. Now then they said, come, let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves. Otherwise we should be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. Which is sort of a strange thing to assert. You know, I say, hey to my family. A family home, evening. Hey, we need to practice speaking English because otherwise we'll start speaking different languages and be scattered upon the whole world. I don't think that normally enters into most people's worry about what's coming. All right. The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which mortals had built. And the Lord said, look, they are one people, and they have all one language.

John Dehlin [00:30:36] And.

John Larsen [00:30:36] And this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there so they will not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel because the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there, the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of. Of all the earth. That's it. That's the story of the Tower of Babel.

John Dehlin [00:31:08] You just read the whole thing?

John Larsen [00:31:11] I read you the whole thing.

John Dehlin [00:31:12] All right, that's it.

John Larsen [00:31:14] So. So it's this. It's this thing that's. That's. That's. That's mentioned out there in this biblical narrative like other stories in Genesis, like, you know, the. The. I think chapter eight and nine or the flood. And then chapter 10 is the genealogy after. After Noah gets here, chapter 11. So you're talking about these major, major, you know, early events before we start settling down into the. Into the story of the kingdom. All right, so let's talk about how we know this isn't true. Natural language changes in predictable ways because you don't speak a language all by yourself. You have to have a group of people to share the vocabulary and your expression, your tonality and your accent and all that kind of stuff. So one person doesn't really have that much influence on language. It's a social phenomena. It's an emergent property of our communication. It's not something that evolves individually for us. It evolves in group, like culture or things like that. So because we rely on each other for communication, it has to change in systematic ways. If it doesn't, we start to lose the ability to speak to one another. And I can go to some sections of London and hear people speaking, you know, cockney, and I can't understand a word they're saying. So they're ostensibly speaking English, but there is enough variety, free variety, even now in English, that there's people who you talk to and you wouldn't be able to understand them. And that takes them becoming isolated as a group from the. The other speakers. And language does drift. So, for example, Spanish and Italian, Modern Spanish and Italian are both derivative languages from the Latin that was spoken in Rome, you know, at the time of the. Of the New Testament. And the scholars can take you back piece by piece, how this vowel shifted from a long a to a short A, or this o sound became an umlaut ooh sound, and then it shifted to an ooh sound. As the language change, it does so systematically. And that can be studied because most of the time when people wrote languages, they wrote them phonetically. So. So we're able to discern a lot of things. As a matter of fact, if you're reading the King James English, you need to pronounce every letter. You see, King James was written phonetically. So when it says K, N, I, F, E, you know, it was pronounced kanifi because they didn't. They don't have any kind of French ending endings in English at that time. So if we take all the languages that are around Europe and we start tracing them back, the funny thing is that regular change of language that happens generation after generation after generation can be extrapolated backwards. So you can take a language, let's say, like the oldest version of Greek we have, and we can still presume different changes by looking at other dialects around them. And if we do this, we trace back to a language, a proto language they're referred to, which are languages that we know existed, because we can trace this genealogy of changes, and we can oftentimes pinpoint approximately when and where they were spoken. And there is a lot of science and a lot of research behind this. If languages have proto words for things like snow, then, you know, it came from a region where there was snow. If the language, you know, evolved around the equatorial region, they usually don't have words for snow. So there's all sorts of hooks and things and ways they do this. Well, it turns out that English, the English languages, the romantic languages, Cyrillic languages, like Russian, actually Hindu also, they all trans. They all trace back to a language called proto Indo European. And again, there has been, there have been scads and scads of research done on this for hundreds of years. You can read about this in depth. It has been very heavily studied. And they can explain to you exactly how we know that Hindu and English were once the same language. That language was spoken, but scholars put it between 4500 BC and 2500 BC, which predates the Tower of Babel, which the Bible would put at 2200. So, first of all, we can see the, the history of the languages that we speak right now. We can translate, we can trace them back through generations to their ancestor language. And that language predates the Tower of Babel.

How Languages Actually Diverge Over Time

John Dehlin [00:36:07] Okay, yeah, absolutely. That makes, that makes total sense. I, when I think about language drift, I kind of think about genetics. You can kind of look at genetic drift or genetic mutations over time and, or like rings on a tree, like science leaves all these different ways for you to date something. And I, I almost want to say that language has a level of precision that, that might even be somewhat similar or analogous to genetic mutations or tree rings. Is that, is that stretching it too far, John?

John Larsen [00:36:43] No, I think it's a good analogy. They're a little bit different, but it is systemic and it's traceable. So they do change in predictable ways that can, that can be, that can be traced over time. Yeah, so, so, so there is just like genetics, there is a hard science to it that is measurable and it is discernible. So linguistics is oftentimes in the department of humanities, and I don't have any problem with the department of humanities, but linguistics is itself a hard science, much like chemistry or physics is at least some, some aspects of it, like phonology, sound patterns of language, or, or philology, you know, how things change and all that kind of stuff.

John Dehlin [00:37:24] You studied this type of stuff in your undergraduate, right, John?

John Larsen [00:37:27] I did. This is my. We're kind of in my wheelhouse right now. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:37:30] Yeah. Okay.

John Larsen [00:37:31] Okay. So that's the first. That's the first piece of evidence is the proto Indo, European. Our second piece of evidence is concurrent written languages at the time of the myth. Okay, so the oldest written form of Egyptian we have dates from a tomb that dates to 2690 BCE. So that would have written Egyptian that is recognizable, although slightly different, but it's recognizable by modern scholars as being Egyptian dating back to what would be about, well, 500 years prior to when the Tower of Babel was supposed to happen. We have Sumerian writing in the form of cuneiform that dates back to about 2600. So now we've got two languages in the Fertile Crescent area that are different languages. Cuneiform, Egyptian is hieroglyphic. There are pictures that were derived from depicting, you know, like a tree. And cuneiform was done by putting, like, a reed into clay. So it's very linear because they would have tapped, twist, tap, put it up here, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. So, so then the oldest tablets we have are that. They're. They're chiseled into clay and. And they were used. So the oldest ones we have date to about 400 years prior to when the Tower of Babel was supposed to happen. We have Canaanite writing, the dates, about 2400, and Acadian writing that dates to about 2400. So there's four different writing systems right there from the Fertile Crescent that we know that predate the Tower of Babel. So that would suggest there were at least four languages that had already achieved the status of being written, at least in form.

John Dehlin [00:39:16] Yeah. And. And they're predating. They're predating the date, the presumed date of the Tower of Babel.

John Larsen [00:39:23] Right.

John Dehlin [00:39:23] Are you going to be talking about Mayan at all?

John Larsen [00:39:27] Mayan.

John Dehlin [00:39:28] Because. Because the Mayans had written language.

John Larsen [00:39:31] Yes, they did.

John Dehlin [00:39:32] I'm just, I'm. I. I don't know the date of. Of the earliest kind of artifact or evidence we have of Mayan. Right.

John Larsen [00:39:39] I did not. I didn't prepare. It's the Olmec people who had the oldest. Right. You have the Aztecs and Mayans and Olmec or Omeic or. Excuse me. And they all had. They all had written systems. I don't. I haven't prepared the dates of. That's fine. I was just curious. But they don't have any linguistic relationship either. In written form or in vowel sounds or in anything else we can tell to Hebrew or any other Middle Eastern. Middle Eastern language.

John Dehlin [00:40:08] Okay.

John Larsen [00:40:09] Yeah, okay. Okay. So now we have proto languages, just like where's proto Indo European? We have proto Egyptian and proto cuneiform, meaning we have kind of a modern sort of Egyptian, the one that's in the tomb. I should have written down what it says. We actually have the sentence, they've translated what that, what that writing says. And it probably says this guy had a big dick or something. It usually says stuff like that. But we have proto Egyptian and proto cuneiform, Proto Egyptian dating back to 3300 and cuneiform dating back to 3500. And those are because those languages came from, you know, just chiseling or writing symbols before they had developed full languages. We actually have evidence that we found of those proto versions of language the date even a thousand years before the Tower of Babel. So we would know from that that those languages were independent and already evolving at least a thousand years before the Bible says everyone spoke the same language.

John Dehlin [00:41:11] Okay, I see.

John Larsen [00:41:14] Okay, now we go to archeological evidence. It appears this things get a little bit strange here because we're still in the infancy of these sciences of analyzing the evidence. The major migration out of Africa that we all kind of know and speak about happened at about 60,000 years before the present. And they stretched up into, well, all over, including the Aboriginal Australians. The Aboriginal Australians have been a genetic isolate for about 50,000 years. So that first migration that went out of Africa, up through the Fertile crescent, spread throughout the world. The individuals went, followed, probably followed the coast through India, through the Asian arpeglio and down the island hopping till within 10,000 years they had made it to Australia, where they've been fairly genetically stable since then. So and we have archaeological evidence, pictographs, all sorts of things that we can date that confirm that 50,000 year date. So right out the gate, you've got a problem explaining Australia. And Australia is a problem for all the stories, of course, Australia and Aborigines predate Adam. They survived the flood and they were there speaking their own languages before the Tower of Babel. There are evidences that we have that humans had made it out beforehand. The oldest molar, human molar that we have that has been found in China dates to about 1200 12, 120,000 years before the present is what I'm trying to say. So that means there were likely multiple migrations out of Africa, but those populations either died out or more likely were supplanted you know, one of, I think an interesting fact we find from the time that Homo sapiens and, and Neanderthals lived simultaneously, we have found burn sites where there's Neanderthal bones that show they've been scraped by stone blades. So it's pretty good evidence that our ancestors were eating the Neanderthals. But we also know we were interbreeding with them because, you know, if you go down 23andMe, it might come up and tell you have some Neanderthal blood in you.

John Dehlin [00:44:01] Okay, so I think what I'm hearing you say is that archaeological evidence, it is on the side of the linguistic evidence. Just from what you said so far, that's not boding well for not just the Tower of Babel, but Adam and Eve and, and that sort of thing. Yeah, we talk about migration hundreds of thousands of years.

John Larsen [00:44:25] Yeah, we talk about migration and human evolution and linguistic development. These theories line up in fact. Chemistry, physics, archaeological linguistics, archaeology, linguistics, history, geology and biology all line up in ways that there's not contradiction that we see those things, those things happening. So for example, we can do carbon 14 dating on objects dating a few thousand years old and find the date on them or find other evidence that would suggest when they're around and those things match up. So, so these major fields of science, you know, of course, if you're, if you're, if you're doing carbon 1414 dating, you're, you're participating in chemistry. So, so, and I'm not going to try to explain all the nuances of all the dating methods. I went through that in college. I understood that. I'm not an expert in it, but they're out there. This is to be had. This is not. There's, there's a lot of time these sciences are dismissed by individuals because they don't understand them. But that is no reason to dismiss any of these sciences. They are very well developed, very well understood. And unlike the milk before meat philosophy of religion, science doesn't have that. All of you are free to go see all the research on proto Indo European. Nobody's going to hold you back. It's all published, it all can be found. Sometimes it's a little obscure, you have to dig to find it, but it can be found.

John Dehlin [00:45:48] Well, I wasn't trying to shorten your, your enumeration of evidences, so please keep going because it's when all the different scientific disciplines converge with consensus. It's, that's when it's most powerful. So please don't let us stop Your enumeration of evidences?

John Larsen [00:46:07] No, no, and I, I think we, I think we're right there. You know, the, and the point I, I want to make is without going through all those things, without going through all the historical evidence that would show that the Tower of Babel doesn't match with, with the archaeological things we're having, or the historical writings or, you know, what the Egyptians themselves said, what the Sumerians said, what the Babylonians said, what the Greeks said. These guys, these guys were, we're writing things down. We're not completely in the dark about what they were doing and how they lived. And. But the problem is when we find archaeological discoveries that the religious people don't like, and unfortunately, in countries like the United States, religious fundamentalists have a way over influence in our political system. And one of the weakest points of democracy is democracy is really, and I'm not here, I'm not attack on democracy. I just want to point this out. The democracy is really the rule by opinion. And so if there's a lot of people who don't like scientific data and they don't like what it says about them or about their society, they will tend to vote for the guy who says that they don't believe it. And that's usually the sort of response to all this stuff is I can give you these sciences and point you in the right direction, show you how you can know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Tower of Babel is not true. But I guarantee you that 99.999 of believers who happen to listen to me on this will not do it because it's, it's, it's hard, it's inconvenient, and there's no upside for them. You know, they, they have a life that's constructed around these myths, right?

John Dehlin [00:47:41] Totally. Totally.

John Larsen [00:47:44] Okay, so I think we've kind of established that it happens in the Bible, and I think we've established that it's not true. I mean, I didn't, I didn't spend two hours cursing you out and explaining every little nuance of science. But do we have to at this stage? This is basic stuff that has been understood for hundreds of years. Like the science that deconstructs the Bible is Nothing recent. It's 19th century science.

John Dehlin [00:48:08] Yeah. Did you even mention, you know, the discipline of genetics? You know, we've done it. We'll, we'll put a link in the show notes to our episodes of Simon Sotherton. But it's not just linguistics. It's not just Archeology, anthropology. It's also genetics, it's geology, it's chemistry.

What Linguistics Reveals About the Babel Narrative

Carah Burrell [00:48:29] Because it makes this idea that there are these people who are all of, like, one race, presumably, like building the Tower of Babel, and then their languages are all confounded and they're speaking different languages. But what about their skin color and what about their customs and what about them being scattered? So, yeah, like, the melanin in people's skin would have had to change at the same time that their languages are changing, would they not?

John Dehlin [00:48:50] Yeah, yeah, well.

John Larsen [00:48:52] And languages are full of all sorts of problems. We know this because we're constantly trying to re. Engineer language. There's people who want you to put rated R rating on here because they don't like the language I use. There's people who, who are saying, you can say this term, or if you say this college professor, we're going to get you fired. You're not woken up. Or if you say that, you know, like, we're constantly trying to engineer language. Remember when Congress changed the name of French fries to Freedom Fries because they were mad at the French? They didn't sign on for our bogus war in Iraq?

Carah Burrell [00:49:24] The important stuff.

John Larsen [00:49:25] Yeah, yeah. We're always trying to do it. But if you believe this story, you believe that the menagerie of languages that we have in the world today, with all their problems and biases and prejudice and sexism, were just invented by God on a Thursday. He just made them all up and just passed them out to whoever was hanging around that they didn't. They didn't grow in response to their environment. We believe that God just said, okay, here's. Here's 44 new languages and go your own way.

Carah Burrell [00:49:54] Yeah. Speaking of language, people really want you to say the F word. So if this, if this moment strikes you, by the way, John, that's what the chat's all in about. They're like, we've been doing this for 50 minutes and we haven't heard a curse word yet. Just letting you know.

John Larsen [00:50:04] All right, well, I'm disappointed if there's anything they should have learned. If you ask me to do something, I'm obviously not going to.

John Dehlin [00:50:11] You blew it.

Carah Burrell [00:50:12] It's fine.

John Larsen [00:50:14] I would have. I would have been dropping just golden fat F bombs. But now you asked for it now, because.

Carah Burrell [00:50:19] Do you remember everybody when John Larsen did the episode. It's probably Mormon expressions, You had that original point about, like, does Heavenly Father get a boner? Or something like that. Remember that? And like, in that same vein of being blue and crass it also makes me wonder what you just said. Like, did Heavenly Father, did God create this language on a Thursday afternoon? Did they have swear words? Did he employ the people to be able to express themselves in sinful ways?

John Dehlin [00:50:49] Yeah. So in the languages, in the languages the Heavenly Father created, did he include swear words?

Carah Burrell [00:50:54] Yeah. When you're, like, banging the madam, are you speaking godly words? Or do they have, like. Did they have dirty talk? Did they have dirty talk in Babylon? When? After this, after the tower fell?

John Dehlin [00:51:04] All the important questions I'm asking, all the important.

Carah Burrell [00:51:06] Did Heavenly Father give them language in which to express their.

John Larsen [00:51:10] Their carnal desires for one another?

Carah Burrell [00:51:13] I'm gonna shut up now. But anyway, I think that's, that's the real question.

John Dehlin [00:51:16] I think everything else is pretty much unimportant besides that question.

John Larsen [00:51:19] Yeah, it's a fantastic question.

John Dehlin [00:51:22] Because that's why we can't quit you, Carah. That's why we can't quit you.

Carah Burrell [00:51:25] Can't quit you.

John Larsen [00:51:26] You can never scratch this stuff very deep, because it all just falls apart very, very quickly. Right? And then I have to ask yourself, why? Why did he create, like, languages that are close but not quite? Like, why Spanish and Portuguese, of course, those both came from Latin. But, you know, the assumption is that, is that these languages that were similar to them, to each other. I know because I, I, When I was in college, I studied Bali and Sanskrit, you know, and they're, they, they have a lot of carryover. Why would he do that? Why would he create two languages that are close but not quite, you know? Okay. By the way, there's one that I

John Dehlin [00:52:05] skipped over that languages that happen to evolve with the peoples as they advanced over time and separated. I mean, it's just, it's. Yeah, it's kind of ridiculous. Right?

John Larsen [00:52:18] Well, and we have, we have what are called language isolates, which are languages that are not related to any other language around them. Probably the example most people have heard of, they've heard of any. Is Basque, which is spoken in parts of Spain and France. And Basque is not related to any of the Germanic or Romantic languages. It is all its own. It is not a proto Indo European language. So it's probably a language that's been there since before the proto Indo Europeans migrated into Europe. The Basque people are the ones who wear the berets, by the way. That's if you berets come from Basque country. So you have to ask the same question. If God's creating all these languages, why would he create one language that's unlike anything else? And all the other languages around now there are apologists out there, especially fundamentalist apologists, especially racist white nationalist fundamentalists who will identify modern languages, modern European languages with the 10 tribes, you know, and they'll say, okay, well, Dan is the Danes, the Danish people. And they go on and on and on. All that is complete and utter. It is not backed up by science at all. Yeah, and there probably never were 12 tribes anyway. Okay, let's talk about the Book of

The Tower of Babel in the Book of Mormon

John Dehlin [00:53:42] Mormon, John, really quickly. I, I believe I did. We did an episode with this with LDS discussions that hasn't yet aired on the Tower of Babel. Is it, Isn't this story of the Tower of Babel, doesn't it come from the Epic of Gilgamesh? Isn't it sort of a story that we can even trace its existence prior to the Old Testament? Have you heard that?

John Larsen [00:54:06] Yes, I was going to go into a section about that. There are parallel stories like this all over. No, I'm glad you brought it up because I jettisoned it from my notes.

John Dehlin [00:54:13] Oh, okay, okay.

John Larsen [00:54:14] But yes, there are parallel myths around that religions sort of take back and forth from, from each other, you know, and, and you can start seeing like, was it Horus was born on December 25th and Hercules was born on December 25th and Jesus was born on December 25th and, and you know, like battles of light and dark. And there's a lot of stuff, especially in Genesis that shows up in the Epic of Gilgamesh or some of these other scripture scriptures, the Book of the Dead, of course. Nibley, whenever he would see sort of parallels between, between Egyptian mythology and Jewish mythology, he would always make the connection and he would, he would take the pearl of great price connection that the Egypt, Egyptian religion was just a perverted version of the actual true priesthood. But I mean, Cairo is like 90 miles away from Tel Aviv or something like, like they are amazingly close. I don't know, I'm just making that up. But they're really close. So that they would have had people who are trading and moving back and forth. Hell, it's in the Bible that Jesus fled to Egypt. So why you would have to suppose that there's this big religion that's been perverted when the obvious, more likely story is they heard this myth from the guys who live next door to him and they thought, oh, that's cool. And, and they brought it into their religion too.

John Dehlin [00:55:47] And that would, that would apply to Adam and Eve. The creation story. The creation story to Adam and Eve and to the global flood and to The Tower of Babel. These are all myths that existed in previous civilizations, like the Babylonians, long before the Old Testament would have been constructed. True.

John Larsen [00:56:08] They disappear in time. They, they, they're, they're, they, they go. These, these legends and stories are likely older than anything we have written. And, and then you see them come up parallel in these different religions around here. So I'm not gonna say, okay, hey, the, the, as some critics of the Bible do, oh, the Bible stole all this stuff. More likely, the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh were tapping into the same original sources, the same stories. Okay. And there, there are scholars, you know, like, I, I don't know if you guys know this. At the, at the bottom, on one of the shores of the Black Sea, there's a, remnants of a village down there. And so at some point there was, in the past few thousand years, there was a major flood that knocked out a village that was on the edge of the Black Sea. At least one. Well, if that happened from a catastrophic event, then it very well could have been so traumatic that it entered into common mythology and people picked up the story of this flood, flood that happened, and the people who, who were saved from it. So it's, it's not hard to construct stories that, that these things could come from. But I'm just offering a plausible explanation of where. I mean, I don't have any evidence that, that the, the noic myth came from the Black Sea.

John Dehlin [00:57:25] Yeah, well, it's just to say not only does science, multiple disciplines of science, contradict this story, but we also know that it likely has a shared origin with many other traditions, myths.

John Larsen [00:57:39] Absolutely. 100, correct.

John Dehlin [00:57:41] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:57:41] And because there is for people coming out of a fundamentalist religion like Mormonism, let's make sure we understand what science is. Science is not a club. It's not a membership. It is a methodology about asking questions, finding answers, refining those. So, yes, multiple science disciplines have come to the same conclusion. But that's not because they're in coercion with each other. It's because the evidence has led us to that point. I mean, it seems basic, but a whole lot of Americans are struggling with concepts like that today. But I think we can see how this stuff happens. If you look at the rise again of Christian nationalism today in the United States, and it's all through the Mormon corridor up into Idaho, Utah, down in Southern states, you know, they're starting to bleed teachings and beliefs that they have that are not biblical. The easiest one is the Rapture. There is no Rapture in The Bible, it never happens. It's not mentioned. It's not talked about. It's not a biblical doctrine. But I would dare say if you talk to 99 out of 100 evangelicals, they would tell you that the Rapture is absolutely true and absolutely in the Bible. Of course, Mormons don't believe in the Rapture the same way Evangelicals do. So, you know, that's not an example against them.

John Dehlin [00:59:03] Okay.

John Larsen [00:59:04] All right, so you were.

John Dehlin [00:59:06] Oh, go ahead, Carah.

Carah Burrell [00:59:08] No, I think, John, I like when you kind of circle back to this point, just talking about how having such dogmatic beliefs and something that people just haven't studied has ramifications for us all as Americans and people who, you know, will fly to other countries, impose their beliefs on other people. They have since the beginning of time. But now Mormonism is really heavy into, you know, in kind of indoctrinating our youth to go out and preach these things that they've never read these books. They never really thought critically about these stories. But then, like, we always like to say, are ready to, you know, sign away a lot of their tithing, money, their family, their devotion to things that they just haven't studied to see its errors and speak as if there are none, or they. They can't, you know, wrestle with them even if they could. And just at any point that we can give people the right to believe what they want to believe and practice what they want to believe. Um, but do it in a more nuanced approach that is not so hardlined, because the second that you start talking about these things, you put a magnifying glass on them and ask people to really justify if this story really happened. It's really hard to find somebody, once you've laid out these. This kind of airtight case that people will be as dogmatic as maybe they were before. I don't know. But I like just bringing up this for that point, that it's something that as Americans, we all have to live with. The dogmatism that comes out of this book being taken so literally.

John Larsen [01:00:28] Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And the problem of life in 2022 is the world is really complicated. And the, you know, the days of the 18th century where there was one guy who was, you know, a scholar in physics and chemistry and the. The renowned surgeon, and he was also the dean of the College of Philosophy at Oxford, those are over. Like, you know, PhDs get their expertise in really very narrow, focused areas because. Because human understanding has grown so much that any one of us can't really understand what's being done in the sciences, which is causing in my view, this backlash against science because most of us don't understand it.

Carah Burrell [01:01:14] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:01:14] So you have to reach this point where you do indeed I'm going to concede a point, have to put faith in science because you're saying, I'm assuming what these guys are saying is true. And I will put my faith in science because I know science can self correct. As a matter of fact, that's a deriving principle of it that it self corrects and I can go and retrace their methods. I also know that science has some things like, hey, if you could demonstrate that the Book of Mormon is true for real, you would have a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize. And out there there is high motivation to overthrow the current wrong view and replace it with the right view. You can get yourself in history books. So there's tens of thousands of people gunning for the people at the top all the time where if you compare that to the Mormon Church, if there's anybody gunning for the 15, they will be excommunicated and dealt with as quickly as possible. So science can correct, but it is complicated and we have to sometimes say, you know what, we have to rely on the experts knowing they're going to be wrong from time to time. But that's different than saying somebody who builds a little hut around the truth and says this is the truth. I'm the arbitrator of the truth. We know this is the truth because my feelings tell me or God tells me, I will reject that every day. But our science literacy has gone into the toilet and it's really heartbreaking.

Carah Burrell [01:02:44] Yeah, yeah. I love everything that you said, especially around kind of just having faith, because you can't necessarily go into all of these aspects of science that you do have to put a certain amount of faith that the consensus like in terms of like carbon dating or a lot of things of just assuming that we know how to date how old that molar was that they found in China. Right. Like as a Mormon I would have said to myself, like, well, there's no way to know for sure because no one was there when the molar came out at that time. Exactly. So they're going to do their best. And that one like fraction of error that could not be. I'm going to choose to have faith in the thing that makes me feel good in my community and the thing that makes me put those negative feelings about carbon dating to the side right now. And just the more and More that, like, you know, you kind of deconstruct your faith in Mormonism. The more and more you get into things, you're like, I can't keep doing that anymore because we're talking about, you know, a system, a book, a bunch of people who are putting their faith in something that is 1000 times wackier than just putting your faith in carbon dating and scientists.

John Larsen [01:03:42] Not only wackier. You're exactly right. It doesn't even work. You know, again, Genesis 10:5 and Genesis 11:1. Those two scriptures are not compatible. They're just. You can't have a world where everyone speaks the same language and people speak different languages too.

Carah Burrell [01:03:58] But John, when I'm in Sunday school and I do scripture chases and I know where the scripture is.

John Larsen [01:04:02] Wait, I thought you said strip search chases and I was about to go back to Sunday school.

Carah Burrell [01:04:06] Those are different. Well, we always talk about starting our own religion, and that's what'll be at mine. No, you know, like that feeling when you're at church. You're like, you're doing everything except for analyzing the text. You're doing everything at church. Like you're raising your hands, you have commentary, you're. You can scripture chase your way into, like, feeling like this is your tribe and this is the importance, but when it actually comes down to analyzing the text. As a Mormon, that was the last thing that I really wanted to do because it does make you feel super duper uncomfortable.

John Larsen [01:04:31] Right? You, you explain how Bittenham is created. You show pictures of stones that have been cut from, from 4,200 years ago. You do all this stuff that, that looks like you're doing a realistic lesson, but you're not doing anything really. You're just, you're just playing around.

Carah Burrell [01:04:47] Yep.

John Larsen [01:04:48] Yep. Okay, so let's, let's go into the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:04:52] Yeah, really quick. Shout out to GQ5341 for their super chat. We've had several super chats and we're just really grateful for those who are supporting us. All right, John Larsen, let's talk about the Book of Mormon's dependency on a literal Tower of Babel.

The Book of Ether and Its Babel Connection

John Larsen [01:05:07] Okay, so let's review what the Book of Mormon is for those not paying attention at home in so about of the time of the big Babylonian captivity, 600 BC, God selected this, this fella and his kids and said, hey, I'm going to send you over to the new world. And they went and they made a boat and they went over to the new world in 600 BC before Jerusalem was sacked by the Babylonians. I think it was 588 or 589 or 5, whatever it was, that the Babylonians, they'd been fighting wars back and forth. By this time, there had actually been a previous Babylonian captivity where the supposed 10 tribes had already been carted off. Again. We're kind of entering in a mythological space at this point, but they avoided that whole thing and they came out here and they started a civilization. And two of the brothers of Lehi were Laman and Lemuel. And they rejected the self righteous, smarmy teachings of the third son. And so God did God's ultimate punishment and took away their whiteness from them. So they were punished by not being able to be white people anymore, and they became brown. And the ancestors of all of the people who were living in the Americas that we already established a few minutes ago had come here in about 14,000 years before this happened. But that's, that's the belief of the Book of Mormon. So. So the belief of the Book of Mormon is. After time went by, this guy came wandering into camp and he's like the last survivor of a previous civilization. And he is carrying 24 plates of metal. Okay. And he's been carrying these around. He's the last guy standing.

John Dehlin [01:07:06] Do you remember his name? I'm trying to remember his name.

John Larsen [01:07:08] Oh, I probably write it down by the.

John Dehlin [01:07:11] I'll look it up.

John Larsen [01:07:12] Limhi.

John Dehlin [01:07:12] Okay. All right, keep going.

John Larsen [01:07:16] So, so they have these plates, but they don't know what they say. Somehow they're kind of able to talk to this guy, but, but they don't, they don't know his language and all this stuff. And they, they hold on to these and eventually Moroni, I think his name is Coriantomer. Coriantumr. That sounds right.

John Dehlin [01:07:33] Okay.

John Larsen [01:07:33] All right.

John Dehlin [01:07:33] Coriantumr is the last Jerry Keeper of,

John Larsen [01:07:36] of this, of this one record this, this, these 24 plates, okay. And so they get hauled around for a while and Moroni, who is one of the last generals in this war, okay, so they have this big war where tens of thousands of troops and horses and chariots like, do this big chase all across America. But the longest, bloodiest battle in the history, as far as I can tell in the history of the world, they do this and they end up in, in, in, in, in upper state New York. And somewhere along in all this, Moroni, who is also the commander of, of the armies here, sits down and translates these 24 plates. And we have the Book of Ether. So, so the Book of Mormon actually has multiple narratives and two completely separate narratives. So the, the, the Book of Ether covers the time period from the, the Tower of Babel down to when they get the plates and then they're translated and they get incorporated into the Book of Mormon that we have today. Okay, so is. I get the basic outline of the story, right? Did I miss anything?

John Dehlin [01:08:58] I think it was hundreds of thousands of people killing each other, not just tens of thousands like it was.

John Larsen [01:09:02] Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna deal with those numbers in a future upcoming podcast.

John Dehlin [01:09:06] Okay. Okay. Yeah, I think, I think that's pretty much. Yeah, the way I remember it. Yeah.

John Larsen [01:09:12] Okay, so I've gotta flip over to my Book of Mormon here, Ether.

John Dehlin [01:09:16] And I don't know if it was Mormon or Moroni that did the abridgment, but you know,

John Larsen [01:09:23] it was. I'll tell you in just a second. It was Moroni.

John Dehlin [01:09:26] Okay. It was Moroni that did the abridgement, not Mormon.

John Larsen [01:09:28] Okay, so we have the beginning of the book of, Of. Of Ether, and there's only a few actually verses that deal with the tower that we're going to deal with here. So he says, and now I'm a wrong. I proceed to give an account of the ancient inhabitants who were destroyed by the hand of the Lord upon the face of the north country. Okay, so Book of Mormon is in the Americas. There's narrow stretch of land, country to the north, country to the south. Obvious to everybody except Mormon apologists is that Joseph Smith is describing the continents of the United States. But apologists don't believe that because that doesn't work. So these are the inhabitants of the north country. And he says in verse 2, I take mine account from the 20 and 4 plates which were found by the people of Limhi, which is called the Book of Ether. Okay, and then now I'm going to get to verse three, which is one that I think is one of the most important here. And, and as I suppose that the first part of this record which speaks concerning the creation of the world and also Adam, and account from the time even to the great tower, and whatsoever things transpired among the children of men unto that time is had among the Jews. Therefore I do not write those things which transpired from the days of Adam until that time. But they're had upon the plates, and whoso findeth them the same will have power that he may get the full account. So he pops open this book that there's these plates that disappear into history that came by these strange circumstance. This one guy wandering into camp. Or he croaked and hands them these plates. And now Moroni is sitting down and translating them and he reads them. And lo and behold, the plates have the record of everything that happened from the time of Adam that until the Tower of Babel. We don't have that book. He's completely wrong. And, and what's, what's funny is Moroni is doing this circa 400 A.D. so I, I established that Nephi and Lehi and those guys left Jerusalem in 600 BC, a thousand years before he did this translation. And, and the book that he's translating left Jerusalem what, 2000 years before that to 1800 years before that. So he's dealing with some really old ancient stuff. We do not have a record of everything that transpired from Adam down to the Tower of Babel. And if we did, how would Moroni know that? How does Moroni know that this record is had among the Jews? How does he know they're called Jews? Like, like how would he have any access to that information whatsoever? It wouldn't be in this book because the book can't document things that happened to the book a thousand years after the book. So he's doing it all by magical, like just. So why do we have the plates at all if he doesn't need them? In, in all these stories for Joseph Smith and Moroni and whatever, whenever they're translating, the translators always know things that they couldn't possibly know. And when you're a police detective and the person you're interrogating knows things they couldn't possibly know, that's a red flag that there's not truth being told here. Somebody's lying. Somebody's lying to you.

John Dehlin [01:13:00] So are you talking about like the Book of Mormon knowing that Joseph, son of Joseph someday is going to do something important, or the Book of Mormon knowing that the 116 pages are magically going to be missing?

John Larsen [01:13:13] The Book of Mormon knowing that he knows that this record of, the record from Adam to the Tower of Babel is had among the Jews. He just states that. How could he possibly know that? Anybody want to, want to answer that question? He have a pen pal in like Tel Aviv or, you know, like, like what, what, how, how, how would he know what the Jews have? How would he even identify them as Jews?

John Dehlin [01:13:40] Well, wait, didn't have to. Didn't have the plates of Laban? Well, first of all, wasn't Lehi a Jew? So, so Lehi would have been a Jew, but then they also would have brought the plates of Laban which would have been the Old Testament up until before Deutero Isaiah, but. But allegedly including Deutero Isaiah, wouldn't they have brought some of that history with them from the old world?

John Larsen [01:14:02] Well, but why would they just. They were all Jews, right? Why would they distinguish themselves a thousand years later as Jews? Well, I mean, words, Words are used to say, okay, this thing's different than this thing. What, what, what does this mean to them when they're sitting in Mesoamerica talking about the Jews? What, what do they, what do they even mean? What do they, what are they talking about?

Carah Burrell [01:14:29] Yeah, it's probably like a mad lib situation. Like they just like put in some type of like random noun or adjective. And then later when Joseph's looking in the hat and it's like the seer stone and God's like, what he meant to say was Jews. That's the language that you should. People will be familiar with that. Just go with that. Does that make sense?

John Larsen [01:14:46] I. I suppose. Really makes zero sense to me. You can sit and iron it out as much as you want, but the fact that they're talking about a religion a thousand years ago was 1021 A.D. right. That's before the Norman invasion. So, so, so like the Norman invasion happened in 1066. So you think I can. I come from an age where I have access to all sorts of books that I can talk in depth about how people pre Norman invasion in England identified themselves in relationship to the Druids from a thousand years earlier. That the whole sentence here is absolutely absurd. If he knows that the only way he would know this stuff is by being omniscient and then he's not translating anything like, like the, the whole story falls apart in verse 3.

Carah Burrell [01:15:50] I see your point.

John Larsen [01:15:53] I'm not, I haven't convinced John just yet.

John Dehlin [01:15:54] No, no, I'm, I'm. Yeah, I'm just wrapping my brain around it. I haven't heard this before. This is new. It's good. There are all sorts of these tells in, in the Book of Mormon, by the way.

Carah Burrell [01:16:05] Yeah. Called anachronisms.

John Larsen [01:16:08] Yeah. You know, and like meaningless genealogy, you know, like, like the, the have no bearing whatsoever. The genealogies in the Bible were used to establish patrilineal authority. So they're there because some king down the line is asserting his authority. But in the Book of Mormon they just throw them out there because they're in the Bible. It's obvious to me that Joseph Smith is copying the Bible over and over again, but not understanding why the Bible was written the way it was in the first place. But then people who don't really are ignorant. I don't mean stupid people are ignorant of the Bible. You know, they have their copy of the King James Bible, they have a fourth grade education, they're farmers in upstate New York. They are not going to have nuanced views on the historicity of Jewish call outs in the Bible. Right. That is not even gonna rise to the level of things they're gonna think about.

Carah Burrell [01:17:04] Yeah. Cause when you think about so many of the lessons of the Bible or the Book of Mormon, it's usually like humble yourself, trust God. I think that's usually like the lesson you get at the end of Sunday school every time it's like, be humble, trust God. And you put it in context of like a confusing book that sounds very biblical and Joseph's just like slap sticking things together. And you read it and you're like, I'm confused. This doesn't look like, but it's just written in such like, you know, biblical language. I know from my perspective and anyone else, anytime you, you feel like you're confused, you're like, I just need to humble myself. Cause it's not for me to understand, it's for God to explain in the afterlife. I just have to have faith. And you don't, like you're saying earlier, like people who don't have an interest in like debunking it don't really look at it like you have an interest in upholding it. So you're not going to be looking for the contradictions or the anachronisms.

John Larsen [01:17:49] You're just like, well, Carah, to your point, one of my favorite thinkers in Mormonism today, Jana Reese, just, she wrote an essay I think this last week and she was talking about how in Sunday school, I think she writes for the Religious News Service and they reprint her stuff sometimes in Tribune Desert News.

Carah Burrell [01:18:04] Yeah, I like her stuff too.

John Larsen [01:18:06] She was writing about how her Sunday school class was using like Jeremiah and the impending genocide in the Bible where the, the, the, the Jewish armies march in and slaughter everybody who's in the land. I mean, it's an occupied land.

John Dehlin [01:18:18] Huh.

Carah Burrell [01:18:19] Feel my Savior's love. Go on.

John Larsen [01:18:20] And, and this lesson about how it's about a genocidal slaughter, but they just twisted around to talk about obedience and being good and you know, like, like that's what I still remember the last, the last question I asked in church. I am not making this up. This is not John Larsen hyperbole. The last time I went to church. I was in Sunday school, and the lesson was on the. The Jacob and the sacrifice of Isaac. So I raised my hand and I said, if God tells us to kill our children, should we do it? The classroom didn't like it very much. It erupted into a big argument. It actually did. An argument like, there were people on my side, but there were people who insisted that. Well, what they really said is, you're asking the wrong question. They immediately went for an attack on me. Now, at this time, I had been continuously going to church. It's not like I was some random asshole wandering off the. I was part of the ward when I asked the question. But there were people who got really mad just for asking that question. And that's what you find is if you take a critical approach, you pick up your Bible and read it, you're going to be like, wait a minute.

Carah Burrell [01:19:34] Yeah. And just to spell your point a little bit more, are there people who have murdered their own children because they thought that that's like, of Abraham's doing it? Is it out of the realm of possibilities that the God I worship could at one point ask me to kill my kids? Let me go ahead and, like, you know, knock them out. Like, has that happened? Yeah, that's happened in every religion. Like, that's brought out of this, like, Abrahamic version of God. And that thinks that that's an acceptable thing to do. And it just kind of gives you the idea of the nature of God. That's not a totally crazy thing to ask. I'm like, yeah, that's the kind of God. He's. He's not. He's not looking down on it.

John Larsen [01:20:08] No, it's tough stuff. And yeah, there have been murders inside Mormonism. Their mental illness, they're abhorrent, but there have been murders to circumvent the age restrictions to the people have murdered children inside the Mormon paradigm in order to save their kids.

Carah Burrell [01:20:26] Yeah, don't even talk about Abraham and general mutilation. That's a whole other tangent.

John Larsen [01:20:30] We could go on Jesus.

LDS Apologetics and Official Church Teachings on Babel

Carah Burrell [01:20:31] All right, have people done things in the name of God that are bad and they don't know the difference between their mental illness and the spirit giving them a message from above. Yes.

John Larsen [01:20:40] So I'm skipping down to verse 33. We're still in ether, chapter one, and there's a whole lot of genealogies there. And then. Then we say, well, 32. Kib was the son of Orha, who was the son of Jared. When Jared came forth with his brother and their families with some Others and their families from the Great Tower at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people and swore his wrath that they'd be scattered upon all the face of the earth. And according to the word of the Lord, the people were scattered. So here is the way modern apologetics work. I'll give you an insight into their mind. There are Mormon apologists, I won't name names, who use this verse and say, see, they never actually mentioned the Tower of Babel. He just said the Lord confounded their language when the Jared came forth from with his brother and their families, blah, blah, blah. So.

John Dehlin [01:21:36] And they call it a great tower, Right? So they call it a great tower.

John Larsen [01:21:40] Right.

John Dehlin [01:21:40] But they don't say they're confounded with their language. But they don't use the word Babel.

John Larsen [01:21:47] So Babel.

John Dehlin [01:21:48] Checkmate, John Larsen. Checkmate.

John Larsen [01:21:50] Yes. So they're saying there's, this is kind of like the tapir thing. Well, they don't specifically mention that. So here's a plausibility that this Jared who is referring to this story is not actually referring to the biblical story. Right. But, but again, you've got Moroni translating this, right? And he says the Lord confounded the language of the people and swore the wrath from the Great Tower at the time. He's referring to this incident like people would know about it. How would anybody that Moroni is writing to know about this incident?

Carah Burrell [01:22:31] They were on a different continent.

John Larsen [01:22:33] It was in the brass plates. But we only ever have record that there's one of those.

Carah Burrell [01:22:38] Right.

John Larsen [01:22:40] There's no evidence whatsoever that the brass plates even in the Book of Mormon were translated and handed out to anybody that anybody had them.

Carah Burrell [01:22:49] They were shouting from smaller towers. Do you remember that story?

John Larsen [01:22:54] Right. So imagine if you found out that the, the true book about the history of the Americas was given to Arthur Pendragon in 1022 AD in Suffolk. And there it's been sitting in some castle, you know, like libraries till today. And by the way, God expects us all to obey everything in that book. That, that is no more ridiculous than what's going on here. Actually. It's, it's, it's, it's less so because we live in an age of writing and all that kind of stuff. This all occurred in times when nobody would have access to any of this. But Moroni seems to have a big a really in depth knowledge of not only the Bible, but the way the Bible will be read in the 18th century, in the 19th century.

John Dehlin [01:23:45] Well, that's called prophecy. That's called prophecy, John Larsen, he's a prophet, seer, and revelator. He sees. He sees.

John Larsen [01:23:52] So every one of these stories, they have. You're right, John. They have these stories that they use as scripture and as this faith thing, but when you point out the story doesn't work, then they just start bringing in magic every single time. This is why I'm not religious. I need to find a religion that doesn't, as soon as they get a wrong answer, create some hoobly Jubilee magic thing to suddenly give them a right answer. In the case of that, they want to be held to nothing. Again, Schrodinger's doctrine, it's both true and untrue. The minute somebody like me comes in and shows that it's not real, then they say, well, that's not actually what we are teaching. That's not actually what we believed. All right, yeah.

Carah Burrell [01:24:36] And on that, that point you mentioned, apologists will say, well, maybe it wasn't the Tower of Babel, and it was a different confounding language situation. Right. Is that where the. They're trying to, like, kind of dodge that one? But hasn't every prophet upheld that the brother of Jared came from the Tower of Babel? Like, are. Are the apologists just saying then that the prophets who have upheld that and they put it in the curriculum that that story came from this exact tower? Are they just trying to, like, deny now that that's the same thing when the prophets themselves admit that that's what they believe? Right.

John Larsen [01:25:10] Well, the problem when you say they deny. So the way the way the church works is you have, you have all of these general authorities who all have all the authority and none of the authority, because any one of them can say anything at any time, and then we can say, oh, well, that was just Bruce Armor Conkey's opinion.

John Dehlin [01:25:25] He was speaking. He was speaking.

John Larsen [01:25:27] Mr. Kimball misunderstood what forgiveness really was.

John Dehlin [01:25:29] He was speaking as a man.

John Larsen [01:25:31] So they, they're very careful to never have a quorum of them say anything anymore. They always have one. And when they're doing things that are really controversial, they don't have anybody sign it. The church has, over the past 10 years. I can't pull them out of my head, but maybe John can. The church has released all sorts of statements that are completely unsigned. We don't, we don't know who wrote it.

Carah Burrell [01:25:51] Right.

John Larsen [01:25:53] And, and, and because at any point they can say, ah, well, that's, that's not what we actually, actually believe. Now, I went through the, the LDS conference talks, and I found a talk dated 1998. I had it, but I left upstairs. I didn't bring it down. I'm sorry. Where they talk about the Tower of Babel. It's, it's, it's the, it's a specific topic. It's by a member of the 70, and it affirms that, yes, we literally believe in the Tower of Babel. And the Tower of Babel actually happened. The, the kind of thing I'm talking about here. It's not like the church will go on and deny the Tower of Babel. They, they speak out of both sides of their mouth. So they will let the standard membership believe in these things. They will write Sunday school manuals that imply them. They'll give talks all the time that imply that they really happen. And then they'll have an apologist who goes and puts an article or an essay up somewhere. Or better yet, the Church will publish some weird obscure thing that, that walks something back and they'll put it in the depths of their website. Yeah, this is one from 1920. 18. I was reading this.

John Dehlin [01:27:00] Yeah. So I'm just showing on the screen an article from the Church of Jesus. It's an article on the Tower of Babel. It says things like, built of bricks, used bitumen, located in Shinar in Mesopotamia. Like, there's no question that the Church is believing in a literal Tower of Babel.

John Larsen [01:27:21] Like, the Church teaches the history of the Bible the same way that Utah teaches sex ed, which is like teaching people to drive by, showing them a cutaway of the engine. Right. Like, you know, you get up there and they'll show you this standard picture of a woman cut in half, and that's her reproductive organs, you know, so you can see like fallopian tubes and stuff. That's the way the Church teaches this stuff. Like it, it's, it's teaching everything. There is no. About sex with nothing that you actually need to know. And so, yeah, so everybody spoke one language and then God changed all those languages. That's a really interesting assertion. Let's unpack that. No, we're not going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the towers 4,000 years ago were made of brick and sand. It's completely useless information.

Carah Burrell [01:28:06] Right, I know. It's like me with my hand up in Sunday School. Like, I have a question, I have a question. And then like the Sunday school teacher, like, I hope she's not going to ask how ridiculous and non scientific it is that the Earth is, you know, 7,000 years old, or that everyone was confounded with this language is just like this really earnest question. What were the bricks made of? I have to know, please. I can't leave without knowing they were made of sand. Perfect. All right, I'll go back. That's what they wish.

John Dehlin [01:28:35] John Larsen, our, our favorite Mormon stories. Mormon church apologist named Dan Hardy made a comment that I want to read to you. If it's not the right place to have me read this to you, we

John Larsen [01:28:46] can say, go ahead.

John Dehlin [01:28:48] So, Dan Hardy. Hey, Dan. We were glad that at least one believing Mormon apologist joins us. Dan writes, does LDS theology claim that the confounding of languages resulted into every language that we have currently today? I'm not aware of that and I don't think Scripture implies such.

Carah Burrell [01:29:15] He left that comment back when we were talking about, like, French and like, you know, other languages. I think it's kind of like the more context of what we're talking about. But continue.

John Larsen [01:29:23] What is. Thank you, first of all, but what a strange question to ask. We all believe, both non believers and believers believe that this story is supposed to have happened 4200 years ago. I don't think there's anybody who would believe that the languages, as they exist now because they have indeed changed, were the ones that God set, set up. So you're asking kind of a weird straw Manny question like, well, nobody believes that. The question is, did the languages set up 4,200 years ago reflect God? That's the, that's the question. And I think, I would suggest, based on the research I talked about in the beginning, that we can see that's not the case. But, but I mean, you're, you're, you're kind of stretching the whole question and then asking this strange parallel question, which I do appreciate you engaging. I'm not, I'm not trying to make fun of you. I think it's a, it's a, it's a worthy question, but it's, it's a distortion of everything we're talking about because there's tens of thousands of languages that have existed over the past several thousand years. There's hundreds of them right now. What are you asserting that somebody is asserting that all those languages came from the Tower of Babel.

John Dehlin [01:30:32] What?

John Larsen [01:30:32] I mean, what, and I, I, I, I don't, I, I, I, I know that the LS Church teaches that the, There was a Tower of Babel, the brother of Jared, and we haven't read that yet. Praise and God says, I won't confound your language won't come down the Lines of your friends. I'm going to send you to the new world and you're going to have the greatest civilization that ever will exist. On the case of the, of the, of the world. Well, that's in the book. Right? And then we can look at history of the language. So I don't understand quite the relevance there.

John Dehlin [01:31:01] Okay. Just wanted to give you a chance to respond to Dan.

John Larsen [01:31:05] No, I, I really appreciate it and I, I, I, I, I do. I'm actually fascinated by, by the, the deeply held beliefs of the believers of how they make this stuff work, because I don't, I don't know how it's done inside one's mind.

Audience Questions and Critical Perspectives

Carah Burrell [01:31:22] Can I ask you another question from somebody with kind of more of a critical question for you? I'm gonna kind of rephrase it. They said, I don't mind you guys bashing Mormonism, but religion as a whole is not right. I didn't know this was an atheist channel and I kind of want to, I see what they're trying to say. But John, is there a way that you could possibly talk about the Tower of Babel without kind of deconstructing the problems with the Bible and religion as a whole? Is there any way you could even just stick to, just to the Mormon religion when talking about the subject?

John Larsen [01:31:52] Well, I'll, I'll throw down what, what religions have I, have I made fun of? I actually like the Epic of Gilgamesh. I think it's really interesting. I identify myself as a Buddhist. I'm really fascinated by Hinduism. I don't know why this individual thinks that I'm bashing religion or why I've said anything to suggest that there is not a God. I believe there's not a God, but that just hasn't entered. And the reason I'm pounding on this is there are folks on the right wing today who like to just argue against these things. They're assuming all the time they're hearing, but you're not hearing me make fun of religion at all. Matter of fact, in the beginning I said, John said that Christians have a necessity to believe this, literally. And I pushed back on him and said they didn't. So I don't understand where you're getting that unless you're just attacking me for things I've said on other days, which is fair.

Carah Burrell [01:32:42] I think if I was a Christian, I would be tuning in to be like, yeah, let's listen to how the Book of Mormon couldn't possibly be true. But hey, now you're talking about the Book That I like. And it's like, obviously the Book of Mormon is intertwined with the Bible. Like, it's. It has the story that grows out of it, and one depends on the other, you know, historicity.

John Dehlin [01:33:01] Yeah, we have another.

John Larsen [01:33:03] We're a Christian. I would believe that the, The. That when God sent his only begotten son, he replaced the old law with the new law. And there's all sorts of weird stuff in the Old Testament that doesn't matter anymore because God sent his son to pay for the sins and replace that with the new law of love. And I would have no problem with anybody bashing on weird things in the, in the. We haven't talked about the giants who come down and screw the daughters of the, of the. Of the priests and make. And make all the angels make giants that way. You know, like, why, why. Why do you have to believe this stuff? Literally? Why can't you say, you know what? This is God trying to teach us. We're very stupid and we keep messing it up, but God keeps trying. That's a great message.

Carah Burrell [01:33:48] Yeah, I came on board with that.

John Dehlin [01:33:51] All right, all right, what's next, John?

John Larsen [01:33:53] All right, so verse 34, the brother of Jared being a large and mighty man and a man highly favored of the Lord. This is another way we know this book is written by Joseph Smith. To be honest with you, Joseph Smith, several times in his writings praised girth, size of men as something that is virtue. Virtue. And Joseph Smith was a bit stockier. He was often described as being kind of muscly and stockier. And he liked to fist fight and he liked to wrestle and stick pull.

John Dehlin [01:34:23] It's called stick pulling. John Larsen, he like.

Carah Burrell [01:34:26] Oh, yeah, I'm really uncomfortable with the stick pulling girth in the same paragraph. I'm just. Go on.

John Larsen [01:34:33] Yeah, yeah, that's. I have all. I'm just gonna leave all sorts of things on the table there. Okay, so Joseph Smith believed that largeness was a sign of righteousness. And here it shows up in the. And again, if you're thinking about Moroni writing this, so he's got this thing that happened a thousand years ago, 4,000 miles away, that he's lost all the context of what these religions were. Because, you know, by this time we could see archaeological evidence of what was going on in Mesoamerica, hell, even North America. There was no Judaism left at all. 0. By the time Moroni was supposed to be doing this, why did he state that Jared was a large man? What. What does that have to do with anything? Anybody like, this is the most accurate book that's ever been written on the face of the planet. Except the book that I wrote that says that the Book of Mormon is the most accurate book. John, I'm going to keep telling that joke till you laugh at it at one time.

Carah Burrell [01:35:33] You're talking about the brother of Jared, right? The one who built the barges?

John Larsen [01:35:37] Yeah. Well, and the brother of Jared being a large man. Yeah, we're talking about the strength to

Carah Burrell [01:35:41] make those forks and stuff.

John Larsen [01:35:43] Moroni, Moryan, Kumar or whatever, his namer brother Jared.

Carah Burrell [01:35:49] There's at least a half dozen kids, actually a couple dozen kids named with that name, I'm sure in Mormonism, right?

John Larsen [01:35:56] Oh, absolutely.

Carah Burrell [01:35:56] Oh, man rolls off the tongue perfect.

John Larsen [01:35:59] Large and mighty man and a man highly favored of the Lord. Jared, his brother said unto him, crying to the Lord, and he will not confound us that we may not understand our words. First of all, what's wrong with Jared himself? Like, is he that big brother that's always like, hey, go give me a Pepsi. Like, like, hey, God's about to confound all of our languages. And first of all, how do you know that was about to happen? Did God put up, like, billboards? Hey, just warning you, in about 10 days, I'm going to change everybody's language so nobody can talk together at all. Because the implication in the Bible is that God changed the languages of the different peoples and then they went off. It says they went off from the tower. But the implication from this verse 36, let's see. Oh, verse 37, it came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord and the Lord had compassion upon their friends and their family, also that they were not confounded. That verse only makes sense if God confounded the language of everybody. So, like, you would no longer speak the same language as your husband and your mom would speak a different language, because otherwise Jared's prayer doesn't make any sense because he says, don't confound the language of me and my friends and my family. But the Bible implied that that already didn't happen because people went off and formed different tribes and they split out from. From the Babylonian tower, right?

John Dehlin [01:37:27] Yeah, yeah. So, like, yeah, if. If God gave you Greek, but gave your spot your spouse, you know, Spanish, you'd have to go out and hunt and find a new spouse that spoke your language and then start a civilization with them. Right. I mean, that you're saying that God would have confounded people kind of by tribe and certainly within a family, not like per Individual, Right?

John Larsen [01:37:52] Well, I. Yes, but I'm not saying anything because this is old Bronze Age myths. What I'm saying is that's what the Bible implies.

John Dehlin [01:37:59] Yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [01:38:04] So. So, but here's the bigger question. So Jared and his brother and their friends and family are the only people who don't get their language confirmed. Come changed. That's what it says in ether. So let's suppose that this tower lived in a city, right? And there's a, like, tablets around that show the amount of grain in the silos. There's the law that's written there. There's instructions on how to get to this place and how to get to that place. There's things written all over in the language that Jared and his brother speak. And nobody else speaks this language anymore. They were all confounded. Why would he leave? The only. The only actual response would be to stay right there because he's the only person who didn't have their language confounded. Everyone else would leave.

Carah Burrell [01:38:53] I thought the tower's like falling down and stuff on them. They're like, we gotta get out of here. Is that wrong?

John Larsen [01:38:58] No, no, it never says that.

Carah Burrell [01:39:00] I was just watching, like the living scriptures, cartoons then. Sorry, continue. Oh, just what the children are indoctrinated with is what I was watching. Sorry.

John Dehlin [01:39:08] Did God tell Jared to go to America?

John Larsen [01:39:13] Verse 38. And it came to pass that Jared spake again unto his brother, saying, go again. Jared too lazy to talk to God himself, I guess. Go inquire the Lord whether he will drive us out of the land. And he'll drive us out of the land. Cry unto him whether we shall go. And who knoweth? But the Lord will carry us forth to the land which is choice above all the earth. And if it so be, let us be faithful unto the Lord that we may receive it for our inheritance. Why would the brother of Jared make this conclusion at all? It doesn't follow from anything that's ever happened in the narrative. Because he says, go check with God to see if God's going to drive us out of the land. Well, that's a general instruction you could give to your brother at any time. Hey, brother, go check with God to see if he's going to drive us out of Salt Lake City. Why would you ask that question? Why would he have any knowledge that that's what was going to happen?

John Dehlin [01:40:08] Well, you said there was a billboard.

John Larsen [01:40:10] Oh, well, that was my. The John billboard theory. Okay. Check made, John.

John Dehlin [01:40:16] Thank you. Is that circular? Hey, listen, John, I. This is a total aside, but if we're getting in the mind of Joseph Smith. And Carrie, you jump in here too. Why in the world did Joseph Smith not just have the. If he's writing this, why didn't he just have Jared talk to God versus tell his brother to talk to God? Do we have any theory on why Joseph is having this bossy Jared tell his brother to go talk to God versus just doing it himself in the narrative?

Carah Burrell [01:40:47] Like he doesn't get a name?

John Dehlin [01:40:49] I mean, why is it like one guy telling another guy what to go do? Why is it just that guy doing it? You know what I mean?

Carah Burrell [01:40:56] You know, sometimes you have a word count you got to fill in for your professor and you're just like, instead of giving him a name, I'm going to type in brother of such or

John Dehlin [01:41:03] like, helps him meet the word count requirement.

Carah Burrell [01:41:06] Yeah. Makes it seem just like more poetic and lyrical. I don't know.

John Larsen [01:41:09] Well, the Book of Ether has that problem in general, right? It basically rehashes the story of the Book of Mormon again and the story of the Bible. Most of the stuff that appears in the Book of Ether appears in other places too. So why Joseph Smith added it in? That is an interesting question. Also, I mean, it's not real strong.

John Dehlin [01:41:33] If Joseph can. If Joseph can channel, if he. If this is a tight translation, right? And we've got an episode on this in the lds discussion sort of series on tight versus loose translation. If Joseph is getting words off the stone like Sinon or Quinon or whatever, the currencies were like Kuraman and Kumamon Kuralam, like if he's able to get like really specific names. So we know that these are actual names, right? I could understand if like there's some weird name like Mohan Raymore, Ankumar, like, okay, I mean that at least has a small chance of being ancient. But what's the chance that a dude who lived four or six thousand years ago had the name Jared? I mean, that would have been his ancient God, you know, Adamic language name. And it just so happened to be like Jared.

Carah Burrell [01:42:33] And you know what the apologists do? It drives me insane. They'll be like, when you point out things about like Alma, like that would have been like not, not a name like that. And people are like, no, it's actually because Joseph Smith, it was like a female name and like he did the opposite of what you think he would do. And that's how you know it's from God. And then they'll like find like some random Hebrew, like is some cherry picked Version of a truth to say. Like, see, I told you so. So they're gonna go, they're gonna say they pick. He picked Brian because it's the opposite of what you'd think he was due to prove that he's not a man of his time. We're gonna find an ancient Brian in Hebrew one day. Like that's their logic. It's like he went with the name Jared because he likes the ring store. Anyway, I'm done with the jokes.

John Dehlin [01:43:15] I'm just at this point, sorry, he may have just. He may as well just call him Daryl or Roger. Like Jared. Really? Come on, Joseph.

John Larsen [01:43:23] You guys are exactly right.

Carah Burrell [01:43:25] What else is new?

Broader Theological Implications and Wrap-Up Discussion

John Larsen [01:43:27] Okay, I do want to address kind of as the last thing here. The last.

John Dehlin [01:43:31] No, don't end, John, don't end. Keep going.

John Larsen [01:43:34] Real kind of apologetic response that they have to this out there. Because the question that's left for us on this whole thing is why? What is this story at all? Why is this here? Like, like we've built bigger towers, right? The hubris of, of humankind today reaching up to the stars. We build big cock shaped rockets and launch them into the air with billionaires. Why was God upset at a four story sandstone building like 4,000 years ago, but he is not annoyed at Jeff Bezos? Like, like, like what, what changed for God here?

Carah Burrell [01:44:16] I thought it was, I thought it had less to do with like the height of the tower, but that they were working together, which is like very maniacal of God to be like, I don't like all of this cohesion. I'm going to knock it down and confuse your languages. Am I wrong? Isn't a lot of it have to do with like, they're working together? Because that would make literally no sense because there's tons of towers that are way higher. Like there's. What's, what's the whole point here? God?

John Larsen [01:44:39] Well, and it says it right in the Bible, it says they are working together to your point, and now they can do anything, right?

Carah Burrell [01:44:46] And reach the heavens. And he's like, I like my privacy.

John Larsen [01:44:51] Or the answer is human beings working together can achieve great things. So the divided state of humanity that we have today was because God felt threatened by us.

Carah Burrell [01:45:04] How is God not the bad guy in this? And a lot of things. But that sounds like, okay, because now

John Larsen [01:45:10] I'm going to put on my apologist, Mormon apologist hat and explain this whole thing to you so it makes sense with the true and living gospel. Are you ready?

John Dehlin [01:45:17] Okay, we're ready. Give it to us.

John Larsen [01:45:19] Okay. What the Babylonians were building with the Tower of Babel was a false temple. Think about Hugh Nibley and the Egyptians. So the way Mormonism distinguishes itself from all other Christianity because it was born at the tail end of the Protestant Reformation, right? So you have all these new denominations springing into life. You know, you have Catholicism and then, and then, then we have Lutheranism and Calvinism and then the Anabaptists and that and just goes on and on and on. And we keep, we keep having more and more and more religions. And you're left with two options when you form a new religion. You can either say, hey, we're just one of the many. We all love the same Jesus. We're all ecumenical. This is the way me and my friends do it. That's the way you guys do it. Look, can't we all just get along? And there's a lot of religions that have done that, thank goodness. Then there's ones like Mormonism that say, no, it's just us. We're the only ones. Everyone else is wrong. And the way Joseph Smith did that is he said, it's not enough to believe. You have to do these rituals exactly in the right way. Which is ironic because it was one of the chief criticisms that Protestants had against the Catholics that drove the whole Protestant Reformation is they said the Catholics become too bookish and too rote and they had lost the spirit of Jesus and it just become all about the Church. So Joseph, actually, what he does is he does a 180 on the Protestant Reformation and he goes back to saying, no, no, no, it is actually magic words said at an exact time in an exact way. And spoiler alert, it's really white guys who that God loves and wants this done from will ignore everybody else. We'll tell others that someday they'll be white somehow. And then, you know, in the end, we'll kind of let them in. Like, like, like that's, that's the pattern, right? So the apologetic defense is that the, the individuals building the Tower of Babel were actually building a false temple. Now, this relies on the belief that the temple, which is based on Masonic rites that are no more than 5, 600 years old at the max, more like 300 years old, have, which have been under constant change in the LDS Church since Joseph Smith introduced the first Masonic rites in 1842. They have changed, well documented, over and over and over and over and over again. But the apologists will still say that the Babylonians were trying to, 4,200 years ago, implement the Masonic Rites that wouldn't be invented for another 4,000 years in a false way, which pissed God off. So he scattered their language and spawned the first part of the Book of Mormon.

Carah Burrell [01:48:14] Well stated. Nice.

John Larsen [01:48:17] I did it a little bit more clearly than they will. But that's the main apologetic defense to the Tower of Babel. They will also say it's a regional thing, it wasn't everybody in the world, it was just some people.

Carah Burrell [01:48:30] And John de Lynn, you have to come and have a defense for. Apparently everyone's roasting you in the comments that Jared is an ancient Hebrew name.

John Dehlin [01:48:40] There's no way it's pronounced Jared like

Carah Burrell [01:48:42] Yarrett or spelled Jared with like a Y. But it's apparently people are like, you know what John, he's been working since I don't know, 9am this morning. He's a little tie tie. He forgot all of his Hebrew ancient names. Forgive him.

John Dehlin [01:48:55] Down this instance, there's zero chance. It's J, A, R E, D, like literally zero chance.

Carah Burrell [01:49:00] I think it's with a Y, I don't know, it's got a symbol, it's in Hebrew. So it's definitely not a Jew. It's not spelled in English, I'll tell you that much.

John Dehlin [01:49:07] But John, you make a, you know, you make me think about this point. Like if we think about the God of the Book of Mormon in the Old Testament, he's like, oh, I don't like the way my children are acting. I'll kill them all, including their children and the animals. Okay, that's Noah in the flood. Or it's like, oh, I don't like the way my kids are acting. I'm gonna scatter them and screw up other languages. That's the Tower of Babel. Or it's like, oh, I don't like the way this group is acting. I'll turn them all black skinned and curse them and all their posterity, right? Or even the Book of Mormon. Like when Jesus dies and is resurrected, there's earthquakes and people are like swallowed into the earth. Like God is a really interventionist God in the Old Testament, in the Book of Mormon. What about now? Like why did he stop? Why did he all of a sudden just completely stop completely screwing with humanity, Killing massive amounts of people, changing their languages, turning their skin different colors. Where did God go? John Larsen and Carah, where did God go?

Carah Burrell [01:50:17] John Larsen, you go first.

John Dehlin [01:50:19] Where'd he go?

John Larsen [01:50:20] He's where he's always been. I. Mean it just goes to show, I think, I think you're demonstrating that, that why These scriptures are not as valuable today. They. They are the beliefs of kind of prehistoric Bronze Age superstition. Right?

Carah Burrell [01:50:43] Yep.

John Larsen [01:50:44] They need these descriptions. But if you read the Bible, there's more.

John Dehlin [01:50:47] There's.

John Larsen [01:50:47] There's all sorts of genocides in the Bible, not just the big ones that you, You. The, the. The. God is like. You are my favorite people. See that land over there? That's really green? Yeah. God, I see that land. It's really green. It's because, like, people are over there plowing the fields and there's cattle there. Yeah. Go kill them all. And, and, and they're cows. Don't keep their cows. If you keep their cows, I'm gonna get upset at you. I want you to slaughter every man, woman, child, goat, cow, sheep, chicken. You gotta kill every thing or I'm gonna be displeased with you. That is in the Bible, you know, and, And John, I am not as. I'm more afraid of his followers than you are, because they are waiting. Yeah. The number of, like, posters and stuff that mention God and have machine guns on them right now. In the United States, we just. In the United States, we just came across the point. The leading cause of death of people under the age of 19 is murder by gun. The United States civil population has more machine guns than the rest of the world put together. Like, we are on the verge of this catastrophe that they want. They believe that God is just cocking his bow. He is just ready. And this was the belief around me by good, gentle, loving Mormons who gave me a great childhood, who were just waiting for the day when Jesus comes and acts out a living horror movie on everybody who did not go along with their belief. The reason, if I am anti religion, I'm not anti religion. I am pretty anti Christianity because they're so bloodthirsty. They want blood in the streets and they want it now.

John Dehlin [01:52:35] Yeah. And so from a, you know, from a. Let's just say evangelical Christian point of view, let's say they hate abortions. There's what, a million abortions a year? Like, there's a lot of abortions every year. Where's God? Like. And that's been happening for decades. Why is God's tolerance for what an evangelical Christian would say is mass murder of millions of innocent lives? From their perspective, I'm asking them, where'd God go?

John Larsen [01:53:04] Well, I'll defend you on this one, because they're. They're all the evangelicals are liars. And here's how, you know, they say life begins at conception, but they are religious people who have religious rights that occur when a. A life is born. So they believe that there is a sacrament that happens when life begins, and their sacrifice sacrament happens when life ends. If they actually believe what they said, then they would bury their unborn children, but they don't. They would name their unborn children, but they don't. And they baptize their unborn children, but they don't. They don't believe what they're saying. So where's God in all this? God never was involved. These guys have been lying to you because they don't actually believe that life begins at conception because they don't act like they do.

John Dehlin [01:53:55] All right, well, I still think that they think that they believe that abortion is murder and millions of murders are happening every year. And I just wonder if they read the same Bible that I read. They're not going to read in the Book of Mormon, but if the read. If they read the same Bible I'm reading, I wonder if they're wondering why God's let decades and decades and decades of. Of these abortions keep occurring. If God's gonna confound an entire groups of people, change their language, and have them migrate to different parts of the world just because people are building a tower that's a little too high. You think God, you know, would. Would take a little bit more umbrage.

Carah Burrell [01:54:35] If you. If you think about it in terms of the way that the Westboro Baptist Church approaches the Bible, they are very fundamentally and literal literalists. So that they do believe that, you know, that having such a normalization of homosexual sex or abortion or anything that goes against their religious beliefs is why 9, 11 happened, is why we went to war. And so I think they can see it in the context of, like, no, we really do believe that God is intervening. He's intervening and making, you know, our soldiers die overseas. And that shows his, you know, con. Condemnation over American society or whatever.

John Dehlin [01:55:08] Yeah. And that's the most extreme forms of Christian.

Carah Burrell [01:55:11] But today. Yeah, but there's. They are the most literal saying that this is God's wrath.

John Dehlin [01:55:16] Right, right.

Carah Burrell [01:55:16] Whereas our point is, like, where is he? They have an answer. They have an answer where he is, you know.

John Larsen [01:55:21] Yeah, luckily. Yeah, we have the Bible. The Bible does not actually leave us confused about abortion. The Bible weighs in about abortion.

Carah Burrell [01:55:29] It's for it.

John Larsen [01:55:30] Let's read, shall we? I'm in Exodus, chapter 21, verse 22. When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage and yet no further harm. Follows the one responsible shall be fined. What the woman's husband demand, paying as much as the judge determines. Abortion in the Bible is a property crime. It is not a capital crime.

Carah Burrell [01:56:04] Interesting.

John Larsen [01:56:05] So it's not interesting. It's.

John Dehlin [01:56:07] So you're saying the Bible doesn't view abortion as murder according to that scripture.

John Larsen [01:56:11] Bible does not. The, the Levitical law does not view abortion as murder. It views it as a property crime.

John Dehlin [01:56:17] And I'm pretty sure Jesus was silent on abortion.

John Larsen [01:56:20] Yeah, the way that abortion was widely practiced throughout all of Europe, everywhere up until the last, really the Victorian age or the 19th century, is when it became a thing. Before that, I, I think we mentioned this in the last podcast. The belief was the quickening. The quickening happened in about 20 weeks. That's when a baby started moving. And the general belief throughout all Europe was that the. There is no life in the womb until the quickening happened, which, which it was when life actually kind of began for, for religious people. So that, that was, that was held all over. So, so getting an abortion at like eight weeks in Europe was not considered a, a capital crime. It wasn't considered. Murder wasn't considered a crime at all in Europe.

John Dehlin [01:57:10] And then the other question I have for Mormons is if, if ancient prophets were willing, you know, catastrophes or calamities with God's condemnation of a certain group of his own children, why aren't modern Mormon prophet seers and revelators tying catastrophic, catastrophic events to the misbehavior of God's children? Joseph Fielding Smith was willing to do that, but you haven't really heard a lot since of, of Mormon prophet seers and revelators doing their job, which is to say, hey, God didn't like, God doesn't like what this group of people are doing. And so when that really bad thing happened to that group of people, you know, telling us why God was mad and why God did what he did, all of a sudden, prophet sees and revelators in the modern dispensation have gone silent on letting us know when God has a wrath for his children. Why is that?

Carah Burrell [01:58:16] I can get my first answer. That just comes to mind is so much of early Mormonism is on the foundation of being a peculiar people and calling other religions an abomination. And so they don't care if they're peculiar and they don't care if they have bad PR from Mormonism. But then once the invention of like, the television and PR started to become a thing, now that's why you see such, you know, hand holding across religions and you don't want to, you know, piss off too many people. And so they're going to shy away from, you know, too much condemnation of other lifestyles more overtly like they used to. Because it's all pr. Like, the best. The best tool that Mormonism has in conversion is good pr. Right. Like, you've said that before. That, like, that's what they care about is authority and PR and saying things that.

John Dehlin [01:58:57] And money. And money.

Carah Burrell [01:58:58] And money. Yeah. Just like the egregious nature of saying that, like the AIDS epidemic in the 80s is caused by, like, homosexual sex and that's why God's so angry at it. You know, this is evidence of it. Like, the Mormon Church would never say anything like that. Now, that is, you know, And I'm just saying.

John Dehlin [01:59:14] And I'm just saying according to the Bible, they're kind of not doing their job.

Carah Burrell [01:59:16] Yeah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:17] According to the precedent set in the Bible.

Carah Burrell [01:59:18] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:19] They're kind of. Yeah. They're shirking their responsibility.

Carah Burrell [01:59:22] Yeah. The foundational text of Mormonism has terrible pr. Bible, bad pr. Like, you don't read that from the pulpit in a PR conference.

John Dehlin [01:59:29] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:59:29] When. When have they done their job? When's the last time anybody who. One of the 1512 apostles. When's the last time one of the 1512 apostles said anything that you would bring.

John Dehlin [01:59:41] Have you not seen the new logo? I love you.

Carah Burrell [01:59:43] Love you, John. That's exactly what I was gonna say. I was gonna say that. Exactly. It's like. John Larsen, have you not seen the new logo?

John Dehlin [01:59:48] It's like, it's tall Jesus. It's blue Jesus. It's a sweet.

John Larsen [01:59:54] It's a freaking sweet Morgan logo.

John Dehlin [01:59:57] Yeah. Come on, man.

Carah Burrell [01:59:59] So, I mean, I've had honest conversations with. With members of the church recently, and their testimony is stronger than ever after Covid, which is, you know, strange to me. But the home church thing has been big. The. What's it called when you Food storage feels like Covid was like the proving ground that Russell Nelson was a prophet to a lot of people, and that's that he really did his job. I. I beg to differ, but that's. That's what he's there for. To tell you to make church an hour or shorter and, like get vaccinated if you feel like it.

John Dehlin [02:00:33] Here it is, John lson. There's modern day Revelation right there on the screen. Blue, tall Russell and Nelson Jesus.

John Larsen [02:00:41] Well, everyone knows that's a copy of a statue that is not a Mormon statue. Right. That's not even Original work.

John Dehlin [02:00:48] Look, it says that the church's new symbol emphasizes the centrality of the Savior.

Carah Burrell [02:00:53] That goes back to what I was saying about, like, more unity with other. Like, Mormonism as we know. It's like saying, church of Jesus Christ, all of these saints, they want to put Christ as the center of the logo, not the angel Moroni with this little trumpet. They. They want to make it seem more like a Christian denomination. And to a lot of Mormons, they're celebrating that because they want to feel more Christian. They don't want to feel so othered. And that's like, whoo. Prophetic.

John Larsen [02:01:15] Hey, you know, that kid, like, in high school is a little bit slow, God bless him. And he was always trying to be up with the cool kids, but, like, he would. You know, like, he would go out to football practice, but he'd make his own pads. And they were like this embarrassing thing, like, oh, sweetie. Or, you know, like, you would show up to prom, but the clothing was all wrong. Like, oh, I could tell you're trying. Bring that article back up, John.

John Dehlin [02:01:41] Okay.

John Larsen [02:01:43] And this is where I'm like, oh, sweetheart, when I see the church. Oh, you guys, you're trying so hard. Let's read the headline, shall we? And let's look at this from an ecumenical perspective. The church's new symbol emphasizes the centrality of the Savior. Is this aimed at Christians? What do you mean? The centrality of this. Of the. Of the. Of the Savior? That's like saying, my new renewed commitment to my wife emphasizes no more beatings. Like, wait, wait, what? How did that come in? Like, why are we talking about beatings at all? Why are we talking about the centrality of the Savior? Because in Christianity, it is the. The center of the religion. So saying, hey, we're really emphasizing the fact that we're Christian. It's. It's like they keep trying to do that. They keep trying to sound like the cool kids, but they don't quite get there because no Christian would use this construction.

John Dehlin [02:02:37] You say they're already focused on Jesus or trying to be.

John Larsen [02:02:41] I'm saying they don't know what they are. That's. You know, like, they're. They're a Christian. You can just get them in. You can get them in a round thing saying, all right, so. So you guys are just, like, Christians. So we don't need the church? Oh, no, no. We need the church. You know, and then you go, but I thought Jesus was. And then they just go round and round and round.

John Dehlin [02:02:58] All right, I got another one. John Larsen. 100 temples announced in Russell and Nelson's administration. If that is not revelation, what is

John Larsen [02:03:06] 100 of which I think I read recently, 80% of them, they haven't even started. Many of them, they haven't even acquired the land. They just keep announcing temples. Right? But, oh, this is the question I have for, for Mormonism is the temple is supposed to be the dwelling house of God, right? This is the place where God's feet come on the land. There should only be one of them, right? We're not a polytheistic religion. If it's the house of the Lord, shouldn't there just be one temple?

Carah Burrell [02:03:37] He has many vacation homes.

John Larsen [02:03:41] Well, whatever.

Carah Burrell [02:03:42] Down from Kolob. Yeah, fair point. I mean, just like the. Every house, I would think every house, every seminary building, every institute building, every church that's dedicated, it said a prayer over it. And that, that's. God can just come and go as the people please with their good behavior is how I would think of it. As a Mormon, that would not be my hang up.

John Larsen [02:04:02] So, God, what is it? I'm asking a sincere question to Mormons. What is it that God is constrained from doing outside of temples? What is it that we have to build temples to enable God to do that? He couldn't do otherwise because we established a couple of weeks ago that all you have to do is for most people, they get into heaven just from dying before they're one, right? So the bar of entry for God, he has like these big loopholes. Why? Why does he not have a loophole on this one? Why do we need temples?

John Dehlin [02:04:39] They're for us. They're for us, John Larsen. They're to perfect us. They're a holy place of worship for us. I don't know. Sacred ordinances must be performed in a consecrated building for some reason, because they're so sacred. The Jew, the celestial Jewish doesn't take effect if it's not inside a sacred, ordained, consecrated edifice.

John Larsen [02:05:06] And your answer is just as good as everyone else's. So well done, John. But these questions are important because so much of what we do in the LDS paradigm just makes no sense. And you're just not supposed to ask, like, it just. It's just because we do it that way. Okay, stop asking. Stop being a jerk. Like, why did they bless the sacrament holding their hands like this for a few years and they stopped. Were they. Were they doing it wrong? Did they? There's actual photographs out there of them. Blessing, sacrament, in, in, in. They didn't have chapels at the time in the church. So they were in like.

John Dehlin [02:05:46] Are you saying in the early years of the church they would raise their arms to.

John Larsen [02:05:50] Yeah, in that, that prayer thing, you

John Dehlin [02:05:52] know, like the Leo.

John Larsen [02:05:54] Yeah, the. Well, when the, when the patron or whatever prays at the altar. You know, when everybody's around in their temple clothes. Yeah, the paleo. Oh God, hear the words of my mouth. Prayer was, was done like this.

Carah Burrell [02:06:07] It was getting too confusing with Raise the roof and they just thought they'd abandoned it.

John Larsen [02:06:11] They invented it. What are you talking about?

Carah Burrell [02:06:14] Well, tell that to Nelly. It's getting hot in here.

John Larsen [02:06:19] It's, it's really funny making fun of the, of the temple. When I was doing Mormon expression years ago, we would have big, big long debates about what we would talk about what we haven't and why it's weird now is because half the stuff that we talked about is not even in there anymore. So can you talk about the things that they no longer do without being sacrilegious or is it sacrilegious to mention anything to do with the temple? I don't know.

Carah Burrell [02:06:45] I don't know. But I want to argue with you about something because if I was Mormon I would have been so convinced that hey John Larsen, it is so important that we have temples. Cuz we came here to have certain, make certain covenants with God. That's what he wants for every human being on this earth, life or the next. And you are lucky enough to, you know, hear about the true gospel, this restored gospel, and you have the luck of, you know, finding a spouse. Then you need to start making these covenants that put you on that covenant path towards exaltation. Because that is God's plan for everyone. And this can only be done in temples. Has to be done. No further follow up questions is what I would have said.

John Larsen [02:07:22] Yeah, yeah, exactly. No further follow up questions. You just give these answers and then you might give another layer of answers, but then you're like, that's for, for, for you to, to know and study. You know, they always said like when you go to the temple. Oh, I keep going over again, learn things every day. So I went and bought my book of Duncan's ritual and suddenly it started making sense. It was actually a faith booster for me when I read Masonic ceremony because now I understood the temple, I understood what we were doing.

Carah Burrell [02:07:47] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:07:47] Whether or not I agreed with it was a secondary question. But when I went to the temple in 91, it was just confusing because like why are you doing this or this or whatever you're doing? They wouldn't explain it, you know, and you're like, wait, what? We're supposed to change our hat to the other side? I didn't know the hat had two brims. Like, like. But no one tells you why you're spinning your hat around.

Carah Burrell [02:08:12] Yeah. Imagine my surprise as well. Temple Prep did nothing.

John Larsen [02:08:18] Yeah, it's like sex ed in Utah.

Carah Burrell [02:08:20] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:08:23] All right, John.

John Dehlin [02:08:24] All right. So is that. Is that it with the Tower of Babel?

John Larsen [02:08:26] That's what I have to say about Tower of Babel. Did I not.

John Dehlin [02:08:29] Babel. Babel. Sorry. Babel.

John Larsen [02:08:30] Babel. Babel. Babel. Babel. Babel. I. I don't know. It sort of doesn't deserve more attention than that. It's just. It's this little funky story that is a just so story from, you know, a foundational myth, just like all the rest of the habit. And it would just be this normal oddity in the Bible. But Joseph Smith did this, and he likes to leave his hooks open because, you know, like, when we were talking about the point where he said, oh, this record has the history of the people from Adam on down to the Tower of Babel. And if somebody in the future comes and write it said, that's great. Joseph Smith used to love to leave those things in there. So he'd go and riff. The whole thing about Melchizedek, you know, comes from just a couple of passages that we really don't understand. And then Joseph would take those. He'd write this big, huge fan fiction. And if you've been fasting and drinking wine and hanging out in Kirtland for.

John Dehlin [02:09:23] For.

John Larsen [02:09:23] For days on end, this stuff was really appealing. Cults are fun.

John Dehlin [02:09:30] He's a shout out to Mormon neurodivergence who. Who likes my. Likes my glasses, but he also likes your beard.

John Larsen [02:09:41] Kind of like meth. Meth. Santa Claus. Look, I'm going for.

John Dehlin [02:09:45] Yeah. And also, Huff Daddy's complaining that you didn't drop a single F bomb, but I heard a few.

John Larsen [02:09:51] I dropped two. Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:09:52] Yeah. So pay attention, Huff Daddy. Or at least, you know, maybe you got. Got a drink of water or something. All right, John Larsen. Well, this is fun. I'll also just say one of the problems with. With progressive Mormonism is they'll. They want to say that, okay, maybe the. Maybe evolution's true and maybe the Earth is billions of years old, and maybe humans have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and maybe the. Maybe the Bible, you know, maybe the Adam and Eve story isn't literal. Maybe there wasn't a literal Adam and Eve. Maybe there wasn't a literal global flood and a literal ark, and maybe there wasn't a literal Tower of Babel, but the church can still be true. Right, but the. But the problem is, is that what made Joseph Smith's story compelling was that he put everything into the material world. He fashioned plates that he claimed were from an angel. He claimed that the Book of Mormon was a historical record of an ancient people. He claimed that he talked to God himself. He claimed that one of the. One of an angel from that ancient civilization appeared to him and gave him these plates fashioned in gold. It was all literal in the material world. And that is. That is where Joseph Smith was able to build from. It's like the literality of the stories and the accounts that he gave people was like ground was. Was like the foundation of the building. It was either the. The cement, the platform, it was ground one of the church, and then the community was built on top of that. And what modern progressive Mormons want to do is they want to say, we're going to remove floor one completely from this building. You're all living in floor two, which is the community. We're going to go ahead and just remove the first floor of the building and expect you all to kind of live happily on the second floor after the first floor has been removed. But we all know what happens when the first floor of a building gets removed. The second floor falls to the ground. Right.

Carah Burrell [02:12:11] Languages are confused now. Yeah.

John Larsen [02:12:15] I think that's a great metaphor, and I'll extend it a little bit, is that they derive their authority to control people's lives, decide things like where you're gonna go on your mission, what you're gonna, who you can marry, who you can, all that kind of stuff. And. But they're gonna derive it based on the authority they got from your proverbial first floor. So they wipe out the first floor. But that is the source of their authority. But they're still asserting the same authority.

John Dehlin [02:12:40] Exactly.

John Larsen [02:12:41] We still have the Church who can collect as much money, and we can still make all sorts of decisions because we're the church.

John Dehlin [02:12:49] Yeah. But the truth is that all. It all falls. It all falls down. You can't have the Book of Mormon, you can't have Joseph as a prophet. And the Book of Mormon is scripture. If we know it's a fraud, you just can't. It doesn't follow. It can't be a fraud. And God's divine scripture. If the Tower of Babel never happened, then Jaredites never came to America. And if Jaredites never came to America, then the Book of Mormon is made up. It's fiction. And if the Book of Mormon is fiction and made up, then Joseph Smith perpetrated a fraud. It's what Gordon B. Hinckley said. It's either everything it claims to be, which relies on the Tower of Babel being a true historical event. It's either that or it's the greatest. That Gordon Hinckley said it. Or it's the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind. Yeah, Gordon B. Hinckley set that up. And the Tower of Babel alone destroys the whole thing.

Carah Burrell [02:13:48] Yeah, go ahead, John.

John Larsen [02:13:49] Go ahead, Carah.

Carah Burrell [02:13:50] Okay, I'll go. It gets into the. When I was first deconstructing my faith, and you learn about Occam's Razor, and you start realizing that there's so many different religions that have different myths, different origins of how we as, you know, human beings came to be here. And some people believed that when the sun went away at night, it was because a chariot was pulling it across the. And some people believed that, you know, like, what's the big guy that wouldn't stopping around the old town?

John Dehlin [02:14:15] Paul Bunyan.

Carah Burrell [02:14:16] Paul Bunyan made the Great Lakes or something.

John Dehlin [02:14:18] You know, baby, the big blue ox.

Carah Burrell [02:14:19] Yeah, there's just these, like, these tall tales or these myths and things. And when you start, like, looking at these things, as with, you know, the. The tool, the lens through Occam's Razor of what's more likely? That these were just stories that were told to help us understand where we came from. And that's fine. But to John's point here, everything hinges on these being a literal thing. Either, yeah, the Tower of Babel happened or it didn't. This isn't just like, that's a nice story, like Paul Bunyan and my life has no relevancy on whether that really happened. Mormonism has relevancy on what if that happened or not. Like, it doesn't. You can't chalk it up to a tall tale. It actually has one domino. Has to lead to another. Has to lead to another. Does the church have authority from God now or doesn't it? Because there are a lot of tall tales told by a lot of civilizations and a lot of religions. And would you put all of your faith in Paul Bunyan stomping out the Great Lakes? No, you wouldn't. And so does Tower of Babel make any more sense than Paul Bunyan? I don't think so.

John Dehlin [02:15:18] Just to be clear, Carah, Paul Bunyan threw Babe the blue ox. Into the land that made the Great Lakes. It wasn't actually. It was. It was Babe the Blue Ox, not Paul Bunyan.

Carah Burrell [02:15:31] My interpretation of the scripture is that

John Larsen [02:15:34] it was a great lake. Why are you. You saying it's all the Great Lakes? It could. It could have been in the heartland. It could have been in Mesoamerica. It could have been anywhere. You don't know.

Carah Burrell [02:15:43] Yeah, I'll pray about it and I'll get back to you.

John Dehlin [02:15:47] All right.

John Larsen [02:15:48] Actually, John, your. Your diet tribe led a perfect segue into what I want to talk about next time.

John Dehlin [02:15:56] Oh, so you're going to tell us what's next?

John Larsen [02:15:58] I. I am. It's. It's kind of. I'm. I'm a commitment phobe, so it's kind of hard. But we are. And I don't know how long it's been. Maybe you can say, oh, we did that last week, so we won't do it again. I want to cover the elder Ronald Pullman's 1984 conference talk on the difference between the church and the gospel and the. And the intrigue that surrounds said talk. Have you covered that recently?

John Dehlin [02:16:24] We have never covered that. And I was at BYU and that happened.

John Larsen [02:16:27] You have never covered it. Oh, you guys are in for it.

John Dehlin [02:16:31] You know what we gotta have. Let's try and have multimedia clips if we can. I'm sure we can steal them from.

John Larsen [02:16:36] There is a video and we can post it on YouTube that has both versions of. Just to give you.

John Dehlin [02:16:42] No spoiler. No spoiler.

John Larsen [02:16:45] I don't think it'll spoil anything if people go see it. Elder Pullman gave a church explaining why or a talk in conference explaining why the gospel was different than the church. It's a great talk. It's one of my favorite talks ever given. The first one, but he re recorded it and they tried to do it with. They tried to sneak the second recording in, but we have both recordings so you can watch on YouTube the two talks side by side and see everything the church changed. The story of the church changing and denying and. And the obfuscation and lies is interesting. It's not the real interesting part, though. The real interesting part is why they made him do it in the first place. And that's what we're going to talk about next time.

John Dehlin [02:17:26] Wow. What do you think, Carah? Are you in? Are you in, Carah?

Carah Burrell [02:17:29] Yeah, I'm always.

John Dehlin [02:17:30] Can we get you back?

Carah Burrell [02:17:31] Yeah, of course.

John Dehlin [02:17:32] All right.

Carah Burrell [02:17:33] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:17:33] Excellent.

Carah Burrell [02:17:34] This is. We're rounding out May right now. So this will be the episode for June.

John Larsen [02:17:38] Yeah, the Next time, we get it on the. On the schedule.

Carah Burrell [02:17:41] All right.

John Dehlin [02:17:41] All right, John, we're excited. And I read. Carah, I think I read in one of. In your recent Patreon post that you're going out to visit John.

Carah Burrell [02:17:49] You read my Patreon post?

John Dehlin [02:17:50] Of course I subscribe. I don't just tell you to subscribe to Carah's Patreon. Margi and I both are individual subscribers.

Carah Burrell [02:17:58] Sweet.

John Dehlin [02:17:59] Absolutely. Thanks.

John Larsen [02:18:00] But anyway, coming out. She's coming out to the farm.

Carah Burrell [02:18:02] I booked my flights today, so if anyone wants to see any, like, cool Carah, John Larsen content, maybe between, like, getting high and getting lost in forest looking for vampires or mushrooms or mushrooms or werewolves or looking for mushrooms or whatever we're doing, like, we could probably come up with something we could talk about maybe while I'm up there. But point is, subscribe to my Patreon and you'll have more of this mug.

John Dehlin [02:18:28] All right, we'll. We'll include a link to that in our show notes along with a link to the Mormon Expression Podcast. So we. Thanks to the support. Thanks to John's support and to donor support, we were able to put. And to our friend Justin, who helped a little bit with it, we were able to put the entire archive of Mormon Expression Podcast on to Spotify. And so many people, John, are still checking out your podcast, discovering it as if new, and going through the entire library. Because John Larsen recorded, what, 300 episodes of Mormon Expression Podcast.

John Larsen [02:19:04] We got close.

John Dehlin [02:19:05] Yeah. Brilliant stuff. So we'll include that in the show notes as well. If you just can't get enough John Larsen freaking, go check out Mormon Expression Podcast on any of the podcast platforms that you enjoy. And if you want to support all this and support John and Carah's ongoing appearance on Mormon Stories, Please go to mormonstories.org mormonexpression Click on the donate button and become a monthly donor. Because enough of you have signed up to support this series, we can afford to pay John and Carah. Get John. Nice equipment and support John and Carah coming on. So please keep that going so we don't lose Carah or John. Is that all right to say?

Carah Burrell [02:19:46] Sounds perfect.

John Dehlin [02:19:47] All right, I approve.

John Larsen [02:19:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:19:50] All right. All right, John. Well, thanks for joining us from your bunker.

John Larsen [02:19:56] Yeah, it's my pleasure. And as always, until next time, I love to hear from people. If people want to drop me a line.

John Dehlin [02:20:04] How do people get a hold of you?

John Larsen [02:20:06] Let's see, you can go to john larson.org I think it's.

John Dehlin [02:20:10] It's there, John, at john larson.org right

John Larsen [02:20:14] john j o h n larsen.org and my email is john larson.org if you want to send me an email there

John Dehlin [02:20:21] and you can comment here on either on YouTube or on Facebook, you can email us@mormonstoriesgmail.com.

John Larsen [02:20:27] send. John always forwards me stuff that.

John Dehlin [02:20:29] Only the good stuff, John. Only the good stuff.

John Larsen [02:20:32] Oh, okay, so I'm not seeing most of it clearly. There's no bad is what I just heard.

John Dehlin [02:20:36] No, I'm just saying you're universal. Absolutely loved. And Carah, it's just so great to have you back in studio. There's so many people that are like, thanks, everyone. I don't even watch Mormon stories when it's. When Carah and John Larsen are on, they don't even bother.

Carah Burrell [02:20:48] They're just trying to flatter me.

John Dehlin [02:20:49] No, I think you're loved. I think you're loved.

Carah Burrell [02:20:52] Ah, thanks, guys. If you love me, just keep my commandments. Yes, keep my commandments. First commandment.

John Dehlin [02:20:57] Homeandments. Are they called home amandments?

Carah Burrell [02:20:59] No, but I do ask for a ho tract, which is like a contract that if you watch my vlog on my Patreon, not to tell my mom or Matt Easton's parents what is discussed in that blog. So I have ho tracks, but you guys threw.

John Dehlin [02:21:13] You and Matt threw down recently.

Carah Burrell [02:21:14] Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Matt Easton, if you know who Matt Easton is. 2019 valedictorian that came out as gay having a good time at a lesbian wedding in California. It was absolute rager. Love that guy.

John Dehlin [02:21:25] All right, well, Carah, thanks for joining us. It's always great to have you.

Carah Burrell [02:21:28] I'm so grateful. Thank you. It's been fun.

John Dehlin [02:21:30] Thanks again, John. You take care, brother, and stay safe. And we can't wait till next time.

John Larsen [02:21:36] All right, thanks, guys. Have a great night.

Closing Thanks and Community Announcements

John Dehlin [02:21:38] All right, and thanks everyone for joining us today on Mormon Stories. We had a great audience of over 500 people contiguous consecutive on the stream. Thanks for joining us. And if you appreciate Mormon Stories podcast, if you value this content, you can also go to mormonstories.org click on the donate button. Become a monthly donor. Less than one out of a thousand of you donate and we always have people who need to cancel their donations for whatever reason. So we would really appreciate it if you could either donate through the super chat or become a monthly donor on mormonstories.org and we'll just keep providing great content for you and future generations. Anyway, be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Oh, care's got one more thing.

Carah Burrell [02:22:18] Don't forget the discord.

John Dehlin [02:22:20] Oh, yeah, yeah. Justin and a bunch of his admins have done a great job. Do you want to talk about the Discord?

Carah Burrell [02:22:25] No, I don't work here.

John Dehlin [02:22:26] Okay. You go to MormonStories.org, click on the Discord channel. It's in the top left. There's different social media buttons, but I

Carah Burrell [02:22:33] wouldn't be able to say that. I don't know how to find it. So, yeah, go on.

John Dehlin [02:22:36] In the top left, click on the Discord. And basically, Discord is a community of almost a thousand Mormon Stories listeners now. And pretty much any time of day, you can chat with people through text, you could chat with them through audio. They do, like, watching parties where they watch, like, under the Banner of Heaven together in, like, a watch party. And sometimes they have people like Carah on or even John Larsen or Bill Real. They play games. So if you're looking for some community, Discord's a powerful community platform. I call it a channel, but it's really a server. Check out the Mormon Stories Discord server and find the community you need. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Thanks, everyone. You guys, take care. Love you all. Appreciate the support and be good to each other. Be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again soon. Soon, soon, soon. On another episode of Mormon Stories podcast, take care of the.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.