Welcome and Catching Up with John Larsen

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your two co hosts for today. I am John Dehlin, and I am so excited to have in studio with me, my partner in truth and righteousness, Carah Burrell. Hey, Carah.

Carah Burrell [00:00:19] Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited for this one.

John Dehlin [00:00:23] Yeah, it's fun to be back in the saddle with you, Carah. And I'm super excited to have back with us someone who's kind of been a little bit on hiatus, only because he moved. But we are so thrilled to have back with us, remote, but also with Brick, John Larsen. Hey, John.

John Larsen [00:00:44] Hey, John. Nice to be back. I'm broadcasting live from an undisclosed location. Do I match the bricks? I try to get the same bricks as your other studio.

Carah Burrell [00:00:54] It's like you're here.

John Larsen [00:00:56] I know, right?

John Dehlin [00:00:58] It's awesome.

John Larsen [00:00:58] Everybody, I'm back.

John Dehlin [00:01:00] So, John, explain everybody why you've been gone a little bit.

John Larsen [00:01:02] Well, as we talked about, I moved to the beautiful state of Oregon, and we started moving into our house right at the end of December. And anybody's ever moved, a big family knows that it's a lot of work, and it took us this much time to get kind of a space and everything set up, but here we are. We're ready to go. So we're back in the saddle.

John Dehlin [00:01:24] That's so awesome. And.

John Larsen [00:01:25] And we're one episode behind, so I. I owe you guys an extra episode.

John Dehlin [00:01:28] Okay, no worries. We're just glad to have you up. And I'm going to give a shout out to Gerardo, because Gerardo was the one who ordered a bunch of equipment for you and sent that to you and then help you set it up. And, yeah, we also want to thank just our donors and supporters because they're the ones who paid for all the equipment. So what's it like to have a studio set up in your new home, John?

John Larsen [00:01:50] Well, it feels kind of like, you know, one of those. What are all those reality TV shows where everybody can go in and kind of record themselves? There's a little room downstairs. It also feels I'm in the basement, so it feels a little Bunkery, like I'm broadcasting from, you know, behind enemy lines. But that's you. I think that line, I'm out here.

John Dehlin [00:02:10] I think that's. I think that's a line Radio Free Mormon uses. Is that right?

John Larsen [00:02:15] Yes, I suppose. I really.

John Dehlin [00:02:17] No, it's good.

John Larsen [00:02:18] I'm. I'm afraid to admit that I. I don't really listen to Mormon podcast. Love the Mormon podcasters. You guys are all great. Your content is good. It's just not my jam.

John Dehlin [00:02:27] John, John. When you're top dog, John, you don't need to watch other or listen to other podcasts because you're talking about the

John Larsen [00:02:36] old dog sitting in that corner by the fire. Like, I don't. I'm not interested in the dog pile anymore.

John Dehlin [00:02:42] All right, well, we're glad to have you. And is that brick real? I think that's a really important question, John Larsen, Is that brick real?

John Larsen [00:02:48] It's as real as. As everything we talk about here on this podcast.

John Dehlin [00:02:54] I love it. I love it. Okay, well, before we jump in, a couple of quick announcements. First of all, welcome to everyone who's joining us both on Facebook and YouTube. We want. We want your comments throughout. And, John Larsen, I don't know if you know this, but we have the ability to bring callers on and have them join us and ask questions. So, John, if you're comfortable at the end, we may have some people join us to ask us questions.

Announcements, Events, and Listener Comments

John Larsen [00:03:21] Yeah, bring them on. The more merrier.

John Dehlin [00:03:23] So. So viewers and listeners, those of you who are kind of hardcore super fans and want to have a chance to ask a question or two to John Larsen or to Carah or to me or to just provide some insight, plan on us sharing the link to the Streamyard. You know, midway through the episode, we'll share it in the comments on Facebook and YouTube. And then don't join if you're a jerk, only join if you're cool. And if we can include you in the show, we will also please know that we have started a Discord server for Mormon stories that we're also kind of sharing with Bill Real and Radio Free Mormon. And so Discord's a great way for you to find community for text chatting and voice chatting and even playing games and video chatting. There's almost 800 members of that Discord channel. Now. It's a pretty beefy channel and. And we think it's going to grow. So if you go to mormonstories.org there's some social media buttons in the top left, and you can find the Discord server and add yourself to it. Wanted to make sure mentioned that. Carah, I think you had a few announcements you wanted to make. Why don't you jump in and make a few announcements?

Carah Burrell [00:04:27] All right. And before I do that, I just wanted to read a couple of comments. Scott said, gerardo is the glue that holds Mormon stories together the best. And then Cherish followed that up by saying a call in show with the Johns. How cool. And I'm not even self conscious that there wasn't a compliment for me. What about the Carah, that is not what I read those for. It just was just. I just want to make sure that everyone knows that they're, they are cherished. So. And then the announcements that I had just center around, hey, there's super chats on YouTube. Please join us. And a great way to donate to the podcast is by hitting the little dollar sign at the bottom and hopefully we can read your comment and throw us some cash to help support Mormon stories and osf.

John Dehlin [00:05:10] Why do we, why do we ask for that?

Carah Burrell [00:05:12] Because this is a donor funded podcast and it's just this really cool community feature just to like help us, you know, throw us a little, A little bit of cash is always fun. And then second of all, Mormon stories listeners, I know you guys are cool, but there's some people out there who've been like commenting on my body and I just, okay, I'm gonna be cool with you guys. You just came out of a very patriarchal religion and maybe you guys don't know yet that like you can't actually comment on people's bodies, on women's bodies and on my body. So if you have a comment about like my cleavage or anything may or what I'm wearing or what, sometimes I'm wearing too much clothes, which was another weird comment I've gotten that I'm not dressing appropriately for the podcast, you could just turn it off. You could listen to it on podcast if this offends you. So I just want to let people know that if they have an opinion about my body, really cool tip. You can actually write it down on a piece of paper, fold it up really teeny tiny and tightly, go see your proctologist, go have them take out whatever is inserted in your rectum and then place that opinion squarely up there. So without further ado, let's do our John Larsen episode. And the other only other announcement is that if you can't tell already, it's John Larsen comes on, you're going to get a PG13 episode. So if you are not into that, don't write us letters and say, hey, I didn't like that because Carah told you at the top of the show we're doing John Larsen just kind of brings a different energy than a normal Mormon story. So it's not always going to be as faith promoting and friendly, but we obviously welcome any people from any faith background to watch, watch, listen, participate. So that's all I got.

John Dehlin [00:06:47] I love it. Yeah, thank you, Carah. And I, I want to echo that. Comments about appearance of any of the co hosts, but especially Carah, are just not welcome. Unless they're compliments. Right, Carah? Do you want our compliments? Okay, I don't.

Carah Burrell [00:07:00] I don't need any validation from anyone.

John Dehlin [00:07:03] Okay. Yeah. So no comments on Care's appearance. I'm sorry you even had to make that announcement. But you did it with such class, Carah.

Carah Burrell [00:07:09] Yeah, I'm a classy joke teller too. John, you look fabulous tonight. Is that a new hoodie?

John Dehlin [00:07:14] It's an old hoodie. But wait, did you just comment on my appearance?

Carah Burrell [00:07:17] I'm telling you, when you look fabulous. I stole this off my dad's back. Literally. I was like, I like that shirt. Can I have it? So weird. If you guys don't like the way we look, there's a podcast available for you. This is the YouTube version.

John Dehlin [00:07:30] No. And thank you for that. Thank you for the kind words, Carrie. I appreciate it. And John, doesn't John look great?

John Larsen [00:07:34] Hey, thanks.

John Dehlin [00:07:37] All right, we covered Discord. We covered Super Chat. There are a couple events that we want to make everyone aware of. We have a new events tab on the Mormon Stories podcast Facebook page. I think there's a women's event that's coming up soon with a new project called the Open Arms Collective that gen camp is running. So I think it's March 20th. You can go to MormonStories.org events and you can sign up for that event. It's 1 to 3pm in American Fork. Again, March 20th. Jen has described it in a previous little announcement, but it's basically just an opportunity for women and non binary people along the Wasatch front to get together and have what Jen likes to call a collective where women get to know each women and I'm non binary people get to know each other, connect, make friends, and provide fellowship to each other. Also, there's Thrive for Women April 2. There's Thrive for Men April 3, and then there's Thrive Houston. Thrive Southern California. And I think there's a Thrive Florida. And you can go to again, MormonStories.org events and check out any of those activities. All right, so I think those are all our announcements, Carah. Anything else?

Introducing Today's Topic: Logical Fallacies

Carah Burrell [00:08:48] No, the only last announcement is to ask, are you guys ready for this? Oh, my gosh. John Larsen in the house. Sort of virtually. But like, gosh dang it, I'm so happy this is happening. Logical fallacies and Mormonism. Let's get into it.

John Dehlin [00:09:03] All right, John, we've got your back. So where do you want to begin tonight?

Fallacy of a Fallacy and Informal Fallacies Overview

John Larsen [00:09:06] All right. Well, first of all, I saw that it was named Logical Fallacies part one, which is what I asked you to. And then somebody had put part one of two. It's not going to end it too. I don't know that we're going to keep doing it forever, but it's, it's just something that we need to keep readdressing. So why don't we start by talking about why I chose this topic. First of all, I chose it because it gets bandied around a lot, you know, about bias. You know that ex Mormons accused Mormons of being biased towards the religion. Mormon apologists accuse ex Mormons of being too biased against Mormonism. So you can't trust anything they say because they have, they have this bias. And it is a trap that we find ourselves. It's a house of mirrors, bias, dealing with it. But luckily we've been dealing with this problem for about 2,500 years, since Epicurus. And we have been systematically trying to figure out ways to root out bias and to find out what truth is or at least approximate close to truth. We, it's, it's always hard to the truth. And anybody who says they truth, I'm telling you right now, they're wrong. Run away from them. Because we can, we can get a closer and closer approximation. But as we get smarter in terms of learning more data, observing more things, taking more people's opinion, not just listening to the same white guys all the time, then our views broaden and we revise our theories. Kind of Science 101. But we live in an age where Science 101 is needed. All right, informal fallacies. All right, let's get going. Okay, so we, we evolved and our brains evolved at the same time we did. So we don't think abstracted from our bodies or from the world that we live in. I think that's a really important point because sometimes we're trying to understand how we think and how we process and faith as if we come from some great mass of spirit and then we come down and inhabit these bodies. That's really not the case. And I know for those of you who are just coming out of the church, you've been stuck in that paradigm. Actually, for most of us in Western culture, been stuck in that paradigm for so long that it kind of blows one's mind to think that there's no separation between the brain and the mind. But the reason I bring this up is that we evolved these structures, the structures we evolved to learn, came around cultural cohesion, keeping the tribe together and passing on information verbally and observationally to the next generation. So as a human being, are we staying? Are you catching up with me, John?

John Dehlin [00:11:59] Everything's good? Yeah.

John Larsen [00:12:00] Okay. Yeah, go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:12:02] No, go.

John Larsen [00:12:03] So as a human being, we have to stay in connection with our tribe and we have to try to understand the world around us so we can learn to do things like sew our clothes and hunt animals. We don't come with that right out of the womb like other animals do. So the problem is there are some gaps in our thinking and there are biases that we know about that we can see all over the world right now. I mean, a great one to see is to listen to Russian citizens who have been indoctrinated in the state media for so long and how they're interpreting the events in Eastern Europe. Right now you have two worldviews coming into conflict. And so you could say, well, John, either one of them could be correct. Well, that's possible in the abstract, but I would say kind of look at their fruits and see what they're doing. If there's one side that's constantly curtailing communication, cutting you off from the rest of the world, that telling you not to talk to people, telling you not to read things, telling you not to listen to others, you're probably not on the right side of things. So we started to figure out tools to get through bias about 2,500 years ago, and we've been working on that tool set for the last three millennia. And we've gotten pretty far on it in terms of understanding what are approaching truth, trying to figure out what is real and not what is just our tribal interpret, or what we think should be real or what we think should things should be. So fallacies are basically. The word is species, which means that it's something that sounds appealing, it sounds correct, but it's not correct at all. It sounds like it's right. And for people who've not been trained in logic or trained in philosophy, a lot of this stuff just escapes them. I. I wanted to choose some examples of, of fallacies out of Mormon writing. So I got here a copy of the Encyclopedia Mormonism sitting in front of me, and I opened up to the article titled Apostate. And they're all here. I. There's. There's literally 20, 30, 40 logical fallacies in this one article. So it's important for us to like, like get down to the, to the ground of those. Okay, so that's that's like my intro as we're going to start jumping into some form, some informal fallacies and explaining how they work in the church. You guys with me? Yep, we're with you.

Carah Burrell [00:14:38] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:14:39] Okay, so you hear the word informal fallacy, and that's going to throw people for a loop. It's juxtaposed to. To a formal fallacy. And formal fallacies are structural. They're mathematical. So we're not even going to get into that in anything that we're doing here. You got to go take a class in it. You can go learn prepositional calculus and some other things to really formalize argument structure and see if things are true or not. So informal doesn't mean like they're, hey, we're just going to use. We're just drinking beers and swearing at each other. It just means we're not in the realm of formal or structured philosophy here. But we do borrow one concept or two concepts that are going to come up from formal fallacies. And the first one is a non sequitur. And it's important that we understand what a non sequitur is. Non sequitur is whenever the arguments that you're making do not actually support the conclusion that you're drawing. So if I say I had a blue balloon when I was a child and then, and therefore I became a doctor, that's a non sequitur, because there's no obvious or logical connection between owning a blue balloon and becoming a doctor. You'd have to have a lot more arguments in there to actually make a case that the blue balloon caused me to be a doctor. So that's what we would call formally a non sequitur. And they work in informal, informal logic, too. So again, species is the word we want here, which means that it has kind of a ring of truth, or it seems plausible, but. But it's not. Informal fallacies are a error in reasoning. This is why I was going on about evolution there. There are. Our minds are. Are not completely perfect and they have some weak spots in them. They have some things that we're very susceptible to, and you can get an introduction to them by watching music magicians, right? They, they exploit all those visual and psychological weaknesses that we have to make the trick seem real. So these things are there and they're going to grab all of us if we're not careful. Okay? But I do want to give a big warning, and this is a very important one for the ex Mormons. If an argument is a fallacy, if it's an Informal fallacy. That does not mean that the conclusion is not true. It just means that the argument is invalid. So I can make an invalid argument to arrive at a conclusion. But the reason I say this is I've heard lots of people debate online, and then they'll point out an informal fallacy that, say, an apologist makes, and they'll say, therefore you're wrong. The apologist is not wrong for making an informal fallacy, but just that the argument they were making doesn't drive to the conclusion. It's a little nitpicky point, but it's really important, and I want to make sure that makes sense to you guys.

Carah Burrell [00:17:41] Yeah, it's like a do better. The fallacy of a fallacy. Just saying do better. But not necessarily that your conclusion is completely wrong.

John Larsen [00:17:50] Right. If you show somebody has committed an informal fallacy, it doesn't mean their conclusion is wrong. It just means the argument is wrong. Okay, so when you have no arguments behind whatever conclusion you're driving to, we call that a naked assertion. And a naked assertion is just. You're saying something that you have no backing for. Like I mainline the ghost of George Carlin, and he talks to me in my head. All right, that's a. That's a conclusion. That's a. It's an argument that I'm making. But it's a. It's. It's a naked assertion. There's no. I'm not offering any proof. I'm not offering any. Any reason for you to believe it. You just have to decide if you're going to believe it. So if we do undercut all the arguments as being informal fallacies or being fallacies, then we can leave it as a naked assertion. And that leads us to Occam's Razor. So Occam's Razor is simply the idea that if you have two theories explaining the same phenomena, pick whichever one is simplest. Now, let's suppose that you don't do that. Let's suppose you throw Occam's Razor out. Because a lot of religious apologists will throw it out temporarily, for a short time while they're making arguments that they'll bring it back later. It's just at that point, you know, you. You could say, let's say you didn't believe in Occam's Razor. And. And then Carah and I were in a room with the door closed. There's a gun, it's smoking. I'm standing, she's dead on the floor. So a detective would come in and say, okay, nobody can Come in or out, there's John, there's a smoking gun, Carah's dead on the floor. If you don't believe in Occam's Razor, you could say, well, there might have been 10,000 ghosts of Roman soldiers in there and actually might be 44 guns that John used a despond, a ray gun, to push to another part of the universe. Or it might be that the walls actually aren't walls and there's a trans dimensional. You see, the problem is that once you say there's no limitation to whatever arguments you can make, there's no limitation on anything at all. You can just say whatever you want. And all, all of those theories would be equally valid because they would all explain the outcome. Does that make sense?

Carah Burrell [00:20:04] Totally. Yeah.

John Larsen [00:20:06] Okay. So the conclusion to an argument must follow from the arguments. And oftentimes church materials are very carefully constructed to not have you do any of this stuff at all. So normally when you're in Sunday school, you're not even making any kind of logical arguments at all. You're just saying, you're just making these naked assertions just one after the other after the other. Okay, let's talk a little bit about burden of proof. The burden of proof is on whoever is making the argument. So I actually don't, and this is what makes my position a little bit easier as a critic of the Church. I actually don't ever have to prove anything. And actually I never tried to prove anything. My rhetorical stand is just to show you that the arguments the Church uses to prop itself up are wrong and the Church is not what it says it is. But I never make an argument about what is outside of that. That's left to the individual. We've talked about that. Ex Mormon's hero attorney. That's part of the problem. You can use these sort of tools to deconstruct bad arguments, but knowing formal fallacy or informal fallacies will not help you actually construct an argument. They'll just tell you what you can't do. So the burden of proof is always on the church because they're the ones making the crazy claims. I'm not making any crazy claims whatsoever. So if I say I'm an atheist, I say that I'm an atheist because I've never seen an argument made for the existence of God that makes any sense in my mind. That's different than saying, I don't believe in God, but I don't believe in God because no one's ever done it. You know, I just, I don't Believe there's a te cup circling the moon. I don't, I don't have any space for that. That in my mind. Okay, so I think we, we've set it all up now. We're ready to go in and start talking about them.

John Dehlin [00:22:04] And tell me.

John Larsen [00:22:05] Ready?

John Dehlin [00:22:05] Yeah, yeah. And tell me if I'm right, John. So like it if you, if you were to stray from saying, I don't believe in a God because I'm not convinced, to then saying, I'm certain that there's no God anywhere in existence, you've now strayed into almost religious territory in the sense that you're making an extraordinary claim that you would need evidence to back up. Is that correct?

John Larsen [00:22:27] Yeah, yeah. I mean, let's unpack your, your, your sentence. You, you use the word God, which is an argument in and of itself. You're, you're implying that there's an entity that has properties, God, and you use the word existence. Again, you have to define what existence means. So, you know, like, at some point here in the future, I'm going to die, but my body is still going to be right there. Do I still exist? Well, it's a tough question, right? You said universe. So the problem is once you start making assertions like that, you fall into the same problem religions have. You have to define what God is, then you have to prove that that definition is actually real.

John Dehlin [00:23:05] Got it?

John Larsen [00:23:06] Okay. All right, so I'm gonna start with the big, I'm gonna start with some of the big ones that get bantied around a lot. And part of that is for us to all underco. Understand what these things actually mean and what they don't mean. So the first informal fallacy we're gonna talk about is the classic ad hominem. Now I'll beg your indulgence as I use the Latin terms. And I do that because this stuff is fascinating to me. And all of these have a long history of when humankind first discovered them and what they mean and what they've been doing. So I'm a traditionalist and I like to use the old fashioned terms for them. So this is a fallacy ad hominem, or to the person. And it basically says that if you attack the individual making the argument, that is a fallacy because the individual's character or the individual's other aspects actually don't have any bearing on whether the argument is true or not. So you could say, hey, you know, John said that the moon is made of green cheese, but John is a white man. So we're not going to believe him. Well, that's a fallacy because those two things are not connected.

Ad Hominem Attacks and Their Variations

Carah Burrell [00:24:17] It's like saying John Dehlin just knocked over the freaking camera in the studio and therefore every argument he has is irrelevant.

John Larsen [00:24:25] Right.

Carah Burrell [00:24:26] That's just an example. Maybe it happened maybe just now, maybe it didn't.

John Larsen [00:24:30] So ad hominem attacks are first of all, they're the bread and butter of the church and we're going to read through some. But what it does is it mentally I was saying these things kind of evolved. It gives us a filter for deciding who to listen to and who not to listen to. So the classic ad hominem, which you address at the beginning of every episode is you say John might use some English words that you listener don't want to hear so you don't have to listen. That's a complete fallacy. Right. There is no connection between swear words and the strength of the argument. None whatsoever.

John Dehlin [00:25:14] Got it.

John Larsen [00:25:16] Okay. But I think there's an important thing here before we and ad hominems. There's a whole bunch of them. There's a whole bunch of different attacks. We're going to focus in on one. But there is actually a carve out where an ad hominem attack is a valid argument and that carve out is if the trait in consideration is instrumental in part of the character into the argument. Does that make sense?

Carah Burrell [00:25:44] Yes, absolutely. Your audio is perfect in our headphones and I heard every word you said.

John Dehlin [00:25:50] Makes total sense.

John Larsen [00:25:50] Okay, thanks. The validation guys. I like, I like when you have to give me audio cues. That's, that's okay. So I, that, that. Because that's something that, that this sort of debate goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth in the, in the forums that you'll see where, where believers and non believers go after one another. And I want to make sure, because I've seen apologists push back on when, when um, ex Mormons say attack the character of general authorities or attack the, the, the church for, for having not done something. It's likely that the ex Mormon is actually making an invalid argument. But it's not necessary that the, the ex Mormons make an invalid argument because that might be key to how the church has defined itself.

Carah Burrell [00:26:37] Yeah, and I can see that really clearly in the way that Mormons and ex Mormons talked about one another. Like you wear funny clothes or you wear funny underwear. Like it's not the funny underwear and it's of itself that would make the church, you know, untrue it's what that underwear might symbolize and like the control that it has over a person. There's like more to the argument than they said and it's kind of a waste of our breath to sometimes talk about, yeah, different things that could be under the ad hominem sphere. You know, like people talk about my nose a lot. That's how I know that you don't have an argument, you know.

John Larsen [00:27:08] Yeah. So here's the second sentence again. I'm. This is the Encyclopedia of Mormonism published by the church, which they have tried to hide. So they don't, they don't publish it anymore. So this is the article on apostate. Members of the church vary in their level of participation or belief. Latter Day Saints who have serious, seriously contravened or ignored Cardinal Church teachings, publicly or private, are considered apostates. So there's a lot of stuff going on in there, but what I want you to see is them casting shade. I'm going to skip down a little bit. Apostates sometimes become enemies of the church. Leave the church which claims to be God's official church, or leaving the church which claims to be God's official church, containing the fullness of the gospel often results in feelings of guilt. So you know, right there. And they're using weasel words because these guys are all PhDs, so they know what they're doing, the people who wrote this book. So they're putting a whole bunch of weasel words. And when I say a weasel word, what I mean is apostates sometimes become enemies of the church where apostasy is defined elsewhere as just clearly leaving the church. So if they keep putting sometimes and some people and some who do. But you'll notice that the argument then stands, even though they say some people are like this, well, is that one out of a thousand? Is that one out of 10,000? Is that one out of 100,000? Is that six out of, you know, six out of six? They're not going to define that because they're not actually making a really solid argument. But they will go through and they will, they will, they'll say, okay, ex Mormons feel guilty, ex Mormons are angry, ex Mormons are ugly, ex Mormons show off their shoulders, ex Mormons are fat. Whatever they want to do, they'll just keep doing that. Especially if they can find that, that, that somehow ticks into your pre existing prejudices. So we can find lots of references, especially in the 19th century where they talk about ex Mormons becoming dark, dark skin, dark of eyes, dark of thought. And we can also find instances where they talk about brown people becoming lighter as they engage in the church. Well, that's because they have an underground bias towards white skin. White skin in Mormonism is a sign of being godly, and brown skin is a sign of a curse of God, either from Cain or from the Book of Mormon or whatever curses came out there. So, so if they can tap into that with language, then they're going to bring you along with this ad hominem attack. And their whole point is having you not listen to them at all. Okay, so we're going to talk about a specific type of, of fallacy, an ad hominem attack, which is the two quo Q2Q which is basically, it's trying to discredit your opponent by attacking the opponent's own personal behavior and actions as being inconsistent with their arguments, therefore being hypocrisy. Hypocrisy in and of itself is not a fallacy. I can teach you the truth and do the opposite. That doesn't invalidate my argument of what I say. It would invalidate my argument if I said, hey, to be a leader of the church, you have to be morally pure. And then you can show that I'm not morally pure, whatever that means, then you'd invalidate it. But if you just say, hey, you know, they're bad people, we don't need to listen to them. John Larsen swears he is caustic, he is direct, blah, blah, blah, you don't have to listen to them. That is all a fallacy. You don't have to listen to me. But it doesn't deal with my arguments. And most of the attacks that I get from, from apologists or others have very little to do with anything I'm actually saying because I don't think they want to deal with that.

Carah Burrell [00:31:04] Right.

John Larsen [00:31:06] So, so they actually use this. And they twisted around this fallacy and they use the words acting as a man. So what they say is, okay, well, we are men first and men do bad things. So prophets are only a prophet when they are acting as a prophet, not acting as a man. As a matter of fact, they have that one right here in this. And they say basically apostates fail to understand that prophets sometimes are acting as men without actually defining what that is. So, so, so here is a, a carve out that they, they, they give by. By allowing themselves to be in the same in the two categories simultaneously. It's kind of a reverse on, on the, on the whole thing. All right, let's go to our next fallacy. Any questions on ad hominem attacks?

Strawman Arguments in Mormon Apologetics

Carah Burrell [00:32:01] No, I live them every day.

John Larsen [00:32:03] Yes, unfortunately, when you do stuff like this, you suffer them endlessly. The next one is a strawman attack. Strawman is actually another form. Well, not necessarily. This is also called cherry picking or evidence suppression. So what a strawman is, is you want to attack a certain type of person, and so you construct that person. You construct the straw man and then you burn down the straw man. Fox News does this incessantly. So what they do is they'll talk about liberals do this and liberals do that, but there's. Who, what liberals? Who are we talking about? So they'll take this, this, this generalization and say, hey, this is what's happening. They was right there in that first sentence. Apostates sometimes become enemies of the church. Okay, well, if you're not describing how often they do so, then you've now constructed a straw man, which is apostates who are enemies of the church. Who are those people? Well, they're not going to say, where do those people exist? They're not going to say, but they're going to talk about them all the time. They're going to shape whole narratives around these people that don't exist. It's kind of like the leadership of Antifa. Who are they? Where are they? Where's their, where's their mailing address? Who are, where, where are these people? In prison. Right. It's, it's a straw man that's been constructed and you can usually spot straw men because you can't actually come up with an example of who they are because they want to debate a certain type of enemy. Both Mormons and ex Mormons do this incessantly. Ex Mormons will, will portray Mormons as a certain type of person, and that may or may not be true. You know, they'll describe them as teetotalers who never drinking a cup of coffee and they can't be with anybody else and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we all know plenty of Mormons who are everywhere on the spectrum of what they do and what they don't do. So if you take, and then you create this Mormon in your head and then you sit and argue against them, you're not actually making any real progress in terms of getting to the truth.

John Dehlin [00:34:25] John, as I think about strawman, let me tell you how I think about it. I think about sometimes what we do when we're. Instead of fairly and accurately and charitably representing our opponent's point of view, we will Erect or, or put forward a point of view that our opponents probably don't have and assert it as if, as if that's an important point for our opponent. And then we, we knock it down. So an example might be, you know, if Jim Bennett comes on Mormon stories and says, all UX Mormons, you think Joseph can do nothing. Right. You think that he's pure evil and he did a lot of good. Therefore, ex Mormons, you know, you guys are lame because you're unfair to Joseph Smith when in reality there are probably plenty of ex Mormons that would acknowledge that Joseph Smith could do good and bad. That to me, that's an example of a straw man, because it's basically putting forward the argument of an opponent that they're not putting forward themselves that's easy to knock down. And then you knock it down as if you've actually accomplished something when in reality you've really done nothing other than created, created the perception that your opponent was wrong when really you were advancing an argument that they didn't have to begin with.

John Larsen [00:35:56] Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. And, and oftentimes these, these fallacies can be overlaid on top of each other. So if we say something like,

John Dehlin [00:36:06] ex

John Larsen [00:36:06] Mormons leave the church because they want to sin sometimes. Yeah, I mean, if somebody really gave you that argument, you'd say you don't want to sin, you don't desire sin. Isn't that the very definition of sin? Or things we desire that we shouldn't have? Well, we sin too, but ex Mormons really wanted to sin and I had a brother in law and he left the church and then he had an affair. And Mormons don't have affairs. Well, yeah, but he wouldn't have the affair if he hadn't left the church. These are all straw man arguments. We're talking, we're talking about hypotheticals of, of undefined words. What sin, what sin do people want to commit?

Carah Burrell [00:36:48] Right.

John Larsen [00:36:48] And then how do you know? How do you know they wanted to sin? Where are you getting that information? But, but if you listen to a lot of talks coming from in church, they will construct tons and tons and tons of straw men. They just set them up and knock them back down again. But again, this is a bipartisan issue. Everybody's out there doing it, which is why the Internet is lame. You can randomly pick any thread on, on Reddit and then this is John's Reddit roulette. Pick any random ex Mormon Reddit thread and then go in there and type, this is a straw man. Argument and you'll be correct. Chance, you'll be right.

Carah Burrell [00:37:29] Yeah. And the only thing I want to add to that is, in my experience, you know, becoming an ex Mormon sometimes is just being confronted with information that you didn't know before. Right. And so a lot of the conversations I've had online as an ex Mormon just comes down to Mormons not knowing things that maybe they would be an ex Mormon if they did know. So I've mentioned online one time on Twitter that one of the main reasons I left it was beginning to understand that the church leadership doesn't accept evolution and that the prophet denies evolution. And, you know, you've heard those different quotes that Russell Nelson said and a bunch of Mormons would argue with me. And they called that a straw man argument because they said Mormons accept evolution because it's taught at byu. And I was like, that's not what I said. I'm like the. There's no straw man here. If I can't support a leadership. And so I'll get accused of straw men from people who don't know the church themselves. They'll think that I'm straw manning them. And I want to give a good faith interpretation. I admit, you know where the church makes corrections, but you also are talking to people who don't have a good grasp of what the church actually is sometimes, and they will accuse anyone who says anything that's new to them as a straw man. So I just want to point that out.

John Larsen [00:38:35] Yeah, yeah, you're right. But you're actually dipping your foot into our next fallacy, which is the no True Scotsman. The no True Scotsman. I don't know what the original story is, but. But the joke of the title comes from the idea that you just outlined. Say. Well, say. Let me try to think of an actual no True Scotsman.

No True Scotsman and Appeal to Popularity

John Dehlin [00:39:06] I could think of one. I could think of one.

John Larsen [00:39:07] Oh, do you have one?

John Dehlin [00:39:09] Well, I think I could think of one. So one of the arguments. You tell me if you think this qualifies, John. So no True Scotsman is basically putting up this position that if you're not. If you're not sort of the ideal, perfect representative of a particular group, if in any way you have flaws or mistakes, then you're not a valid person to speak for the group. Now that's. That's my way of phrasing the no True Scotsman fallacy. You can tell me if I've got that wrong. But for me, the example would be if an ex Mormon leaves the church, you might say well, they never really believed to begin with. They were never really, they were never really that committed to begin with a

Carah Burrell [00:39:51] generalization of certain group by excluding any counter examples of not being pure enough to be included in your example.

John Larsen [00:39:57] So let's go back to Carah's example. So, so they say, okay, Mormons, you say Mormons don't believe in evolution. Which of course that argument is fallacy because you've just grouped all Mormons and Mormons can move whatever they want.

Carah Burrell [00:40:10] Sure.

John Larsen [00:40:11] Say the official position of the church is that there is no evolution. That's true. Now, now in your argument somebody said, oh no, they teach evolution at byu. No true Scotsman. Oh, the true Mormons know evolution. So, so, so it, what it takes is whenever you're making assertion about a population, then it limits that population down. Say well, well, so, so it's, it's like if I said all Scotchmen, all Scotsman drink Scotch and then you say, well there's Bruce over there and he's drinking Irish whiskey. Like, well no true Scotsman would drink Irish whiskey. That's, that's the point still stands. True Scotsman anymore. So, so that's the, that's the, the genesis of the statement. They're saying, well no true Mormon, you know, like Mormons don't drink coffee. Well, my brother in law Joe drinks coffee. Well, no true Mormon drinks coffee. So, so it, it reduces the set. Like you're saying.

Carah Burrell [00:41:08] Yeah, yeah. The only difference is I think that in a church that has such like dogmatic authoritarian leadership, you can say thing about, say things about Mormons generally about, you know, they, some can drink coffee, some cannot. And so you have to be very precise in your language. And so you know that. Does the church support same sex marriage? No. Do Mormons support same sex marriage? Yes, some do. You know, do like Mormons support evolution? Yes, technically. Does the Mormon like prophet, seer and revelators support evolution? No. So you have to be really precise with your language. Is my, my state.

John Larsen [00:41:42] That's really the answer to get out of all these, be precise with your language. But I mean here, here's a fantastic example of that. Say okay, well, well, who is a Mormon? Well, Mormon is somebody who believes that the Book of Mormon is the word of God is translated by Joseph Smith in this latter days. Okay, great. Well the polygamists down in Colorado City, I'll believe that. Well, they're not true Mormons.

Carah Burrell [00:42:03] Right.

John Larsen [00:42:05] So you have a definition that you have pushed out and then when you show the counter example saying well then Mormons do practice polygamy because you just define Mormons. This is, by the way, the reason the church got rid of the. Or tried to get rid of the definition because it's too broad. So they were always saying, well, all these other sects that don't class, that don't bow down to Salt Lake City, they keep calling themselves Mormons, but they're no true Mormons, even though they don't necessarily provide. Well, they'll narrow it down to say, well, what does it mean to be a Mormon? Well, Mormon means that you've done everything that the corporation has told you to do. So they'll define out any sort of theological meaning only when they're having that argument. But if you go to Sunday school and you listen to General Conference, they will define Mormonism out in terms of belief in this greater thing. So that's the no true Scotsman. What you're doing all the time is you're shifting what can be defined. You say, oh, that's not a good example.

Carah Burrell [00:43:08] Yeah, so you can kind of never be pinned down and never be proven wrong because your parameters are constantly kind of within your head unless you be more precise with your language.

John Larsen [00:43:16] Yeah, right. So those three, the straw man, the ad hominem, and the notrue Scotsman, I wanted to lead off with those because those are the ones you're going to run into the most. Just, they're out there, everywhere. Okay, the next one we're going to talk about is the Argumentum ad populum. What, what this is, this is simply asserting that something is true because most people believe it, which is a fallacy, if you think about it for a few seconds. The fact that most people in, I don't know, in Babylon believed in the, the, the Epic of Gilgamesh. That doesn't mean that the Epic of Gilgamesh was true or false. The fact that the majority of people believe that doesn't mean anything. So. So when we start talking about the partition between ex Mormons and Mormons, this works both ways. A lot of Mormons will. Will assume that the way that they believe and the way they see the world because they're surrounded by Mormons is the actual way the world is. And ex Mormons getting surrounded by ex Mormons oftentimes just invert that they believe that Mormons are all wrong. Well, the wrongness of those people has no bearing whatsoever on how many people believe it. The church uses this fallacy, remember, the fallacies all are kind of mapping to places in our head that don't work quite right. They love to use this one when they vote. So like every time at conference, you'll get there and you'll say, all who believe that these guys are all prophets here, let your right hand. And they'll all raise their right hand. You're like, oh my God, look at all these people.

Carah Burrell [00:45:00] Can all these things be wrong? That's so true.

John Larsen [00:45:02] Yes. And we've all been wrong collectively, meaning all of humanity, many, many times in our history. And the fact that there is a lot of people who believe something or feel something or understand something does not make it true. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't push it along at all.

Carah Burrell [00:45:24] John, what if people say, but look at all of the fruits of Mormonism, look how good. There's so many good Mormons doing so many good things. Because that's my parents main argument is there's so many people who all believe this. How could they be wrong? You think you're, you think you're right? Not gonna happen. Look at all these people. They couldn't possibly be wrong and they're doing so much good for the world.

John Dehlin [00:45:46] Hey, Carah, we, we, we dropped out. Could you just repeat that comment one time?

Carah Burrell [00:45:49] Oh, we dropped out.

John Dehlin [00:45:50] Yeah, yeah, sorry.

Carah Burrell [00:45:51] John, can you hear me?

John Larsen [00:45:52] I can hear you. Yeah. You were talking about the fruits.

Carah Burrell [00:45:54] Yeah, the fruits, yeah. Where do you, where do you place that fallacy? The like. But the fruits of Mormonism are so good and there's so many people, how could they all possibly be wrong? And everything they're doing is just making the world a better place. That's the argument my parents have to me every day.

John Larsen [00:46:09] That can all be true, but it doesn't make Mormonism true. You know, like, like there's good people doing good things everywhere. Right.

Carah Burrell [00:46:18] This one has a book with it though. Has a book.

John Larsen [00:46:21] There have been examples of, of amazing compassion on the side of the Russian invasion forces. And there's been examples of amazing compassion towards the Russian invaders on the Ukrainian force. The fact that there have been good people doing good things on both sides of that conflict says nothing about the validity of the conflict from either side. It is just, it is just an artifact. And the fact that you have a society that does really great things does not mean that the society is true. Those two things don't follow from each other at all. They're two separate realms. Right?

Carah Burrell [00:47:02] All right, all right, what's next?

John Larsen [00:47:05] All right, forward ho.

John Dehlin [00:47:08] I mean, so, so John, I'll, I'll just jump in really quick. It seems like when I was growing up in the church. What. The way that this argument manifested to me was that the church would give that prophecy about Daniel and the stone cutting out of the mountain without hands, and the church would talk about its kind of exponential growth and they would release those videos of like temples dotting the globe. And I feel like the assumption was if the church is growing, if the missionary program is growing, if, you know, if people are swarming to the true church, then somehow that implies that it's true.

John Larsen [00:47:52] Well, the Pentecostalism was born when what's his name predicted the San Francisco earthquake of what, 1918, 1909, whenever that was. And it has grown by some estimates to be a billion people who, who accept it. Depending on who you ask, maybe half a billion. I don't know. And, and most evangelicals kind of fall under the general umbrella of Pentecostalism, and we're being, we're paying loose here. But the, the point is that whatever argument you make on the success of Mormonism, you can run into counter examples like let's say Reverend, your son, Young Moon, his group, the Moonies, they have millions of people. Scientologists have millions of people. Jehovah Witnesses have millions of people. So it's only an argument for the validity of the church if you can at the same time make the argument that it, that it's not an argument for the validity of all those other movements. There's a billion Hindus, you know, there's a billion Buddhists. Why is the growth of mormonism from, from 1 million people to 2 million people impressive when, you know, other religious movements are growing by tens of millions and 20 millions? So, so it, it, it's, it's species in, in that it doesn't, it, they don't connect to one another even at all. Like, there's no, there is no something in the universe that says if you get a lot of people to believe you, that means something. And that's exactly what, what the argument says.

John Dehlin [00:49:30] Yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [00:49:31] So all the apostates become drug addicts. That, that it's the same fallacy. That doesn't mean apostasy leads to drug addiction. You would have to scientifically prove that. And that's really difficult. You might show a correlation. But, but, but causation. Oh, that's tough.

John Dehlin [00:49:48] Yeah, yeah. So, so as far as, as far as this argument goes, the whole world could become Mormon and that wouldn't mean that, that an angel delivered golden plates to Joseph Smith.

John Larsen [00:50:05] Of course not. Right.

John Dehlin [00:50:06] Yeah. Yeah, right.

John Larsen [00:50:07] We all believe all sorts of dumb things all the time.

John Dehlin [00:50:09] And Ex Mormons could all become, you know, really bad, horrible, unhealthy people and die early. And that wouldn't prove the church was true either.

John Larsen [00:50:20] No, not at all.

John Dehlin [00:50:21] Yeah, yeah, yeah, it makes sense.

John Larsen [00:50:25] There's. There's been a history of things that we've discovered and then forgotten about for hundreds of years sometimes. And the fact that humankind didn't pay any attention to at all. There is a great example, and I'm going to butcher it because I can't remember. I think it's Lamarckian evolution. Maybe somebody in the. There were. There were two prevalent evolutionary theories in the 19th century. One was sort of championed by, you know, Huxley and Darwin, which said, these are random, random mutations. And it's kind of a. I'm way over simply. But survival the fittest. So the mutations come in and then whoever's best adapted to the environment survives. There's another theory of evolution that came about the same time, which was that. That. That evolution is. Guides itself. So in the second theory, they'd say giraffes have long necks because they wanted to get to the leaves that are up there. You'll hear a lot of people say this. That is not how evolution works at all. The giraffe never looks up at the leaves and says, you know what? If my neck were 18 inches longer, I could get to those leaves. But unfortunately, the Russian government sort of bought off on that second theory and threw their science behind for part of the early 20th century. You can read about this out there. It's been written about quite a bit. You can't just decide a theory is correct and make it popular or legislate it or do anything and make it true. Truth is as truth is. And the popularity of the idea, by the way, this is the fundamental Achilles heel of democracy. And I am not suggesting we do away with democracy, but democracy has huge problems in it. And one of them is you choose ideas by how popular they are, which is why in this 21st century, we are struggling so much, even though we have such scientific progress and we know so many things more clearly than we did 20 years ago or 50 years ago, that we still govern based on popularity of ideas. And those two things aren't the same. And they get it. They cause big problems for us.

Carah Burrell [00:52:40] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:52:41] Yeah, got it.

Reification: Treating Abstractions as Real Things

John Larsen [00:52:42] All right, now we're ready to talk about my favorite one. But you got to buckle up for this one a little bit because it's going to blow your noggins a little bit.

John Dehlin [00:52:50] You buckle up, Carah.

John Larsen [00:52:51] All right, this is. This Is the fallacy of reification. R E I F I C A T I O N so you can look it up yourself. Reification is the problem of when you take an abstraction and then you assume that's true and then you make conclusions from the assumptive conclusion. Let me walk you through an example. Have you ever watched these ghost hunter shows on television?

Carah Burrell [00:53:22] Yeah, I was hooked on those in like 8th grade until I realized this fallacy you're about to talk about.

John Larsen [00:53:28] I was traveling for business a couple weeks ago and I usually don't watch tv, but whenever I'm in a hotel, I just watch tv. I just watch the commercials. I don't see them. So I was watching these ghost hunter shows and you know, they have all these things they have. They keep showing these photos of orbs, right? Little, little pieces of light. To me it looks like dust floating around the room. But, but they'll say, okay, there's the ghost, or they'll talk about cold spots, or they have all this electronic gear that will make noise. The problem is we've never established that ghosts actually exist. So any conclusion you make about ghosts is fallacious. None of that equipment is real because you'd first have to establish the ghosts exist. This goes back to our God problem that we talked about. It suffers from a huge fallacy problem. Nobody has actually defined what the word God means. So any properties that you talk about God having are all fallacious. They're all reifications. They don't have any grounding whatsoever. You can only talk about the properties of something that has been already established as being true. This undercuts about 80% of everything the church does all the time. Because they will say, you know, faith is the better part of charity or something. Well, they haven't established that either faith or charity actually exist. Those are, those are concepts and they're not clearly defined. We don't know that they're real. So you can't talk about any properties of them. We haven't established the prophets are real. We haven't established that the afterlife is real. We haven't established that the life before birth is real. So all these building blocks of Mormonism are themselves not established. So you cannot drive any conclusions from any of those things.

Carah Burrell [00:55:18] Yeah, it reminds me of if you ever get a pamphlet from a missionary or something, you know, those typical like little, the, the pamphlets that you'll get and it'll say like, just like in times of old, God called prophets, like Abraham, Moses, did you know, today he also calls prophets and I'm like whoa, whoa, whoa, slow it down. Sisters and elders. Like I have no idea if God called prophets of old. So I'm not going to conclude that he. I'm not going to take you on your word that he calls them of now. Like you've already kind of lost me. And they don't realize that like most of the world still needs to be convinced that like Moses and Abraham were prophets to begin with or that establishing that Christ had a church at any point and that he needed to reinstate one.

John Larsen [00:55:57] Right, yeah, yeah. I think it's a great example. Mormonism depends on the idea that God speaks to us via our thoughts or emotions inside our head as a non external voice. That's a fundamental principle of Mormonism. Otherwise the power structure of Mormonism collapses. No one has ever demonstrated that one's thoughts or feelings are the will of God and no one has ever established that there is a God.

Carah Burrell [00:56:30] We've hoped for it and we've kind

John Larsen [00:56:33] of already established the hope doesn't matter for anything, does it?

Carah Burrell [00:56:36] No, I mean, sounds nice in terms of argumentation. No, not in terms of argumentation. Maybe just in terms of like I, I could, I could see somebody making the argument that like because of evolution, because of our need, like you talked about at the beginning, of being in a tribe needing to push forward ideas that like while the actual thing might not matter, that's like a very nuanced Mormon, you know, point of view that like the actual legitimacy of the prophet doesn't matter because it's being part of the tribe that push us for, pushes us forward as a species. And that's what I'm like, that's what I'm really into. And the actual like necessity of prophets to tell me one thing to do with my life, I'm going to pick and choose that part. You know, I'm like defining a nuanced Mormon 101 right now. And so but that's, that argument still makes the church have plenty of very nuanced believers. Still makes the church very, very strong. Do you see what I'm saying?

John Larsen [00:57:26] Oh yeah. It is the only argument for staying in the church, saying this is my tribe. I enjoy the political power and the monetary power and the property and the fellowship and the friends. And I enjoy the fact that if I need to get welfare, we have our own shadow welfare system. I enjoy the fact that all of our temples and all of our property and all the money we donate is free from taxes. I enjoy the fact that we can set up our own little pseudo Government, inside the government. Yeah, those are all honest arguments for being part of the church, but that's not what the church says about itself. You're talking about what nuanced people say. And it's an honest view and it's a quite cynical one. It's really saying, well, I know that this is bullshit, I know this is all false, but I like being part of the winning team.

Carah Burrell [00:58:17] Yeah,

John Dehlin [00:58:20] yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [00:58:22] It's just gross. I'm sorry, that's. Sometimes I argue with New Order Mormons and people trying to make their way in it more because it's like your, your arguments go back to pretending that, that you don't have all this reified belief and.

John Dehlin [00:58:40] John, define reification. Just, I want to make sure I understand the operational definition before I try and do one more illustration.

John Larsen [00:58:48] Okay. So reification is all about ambiguity. You take an abstraction, a theory. Sometimes when you go look this up online, they'll always use the example of the map, which is, I think leads people astray and they don't. The idea of the map is reification would be confusing a map for the actual place. Right. So you have a model of something, you have a concept that has not been established. That's an important thing. If something has been like become a theorem that's scientifically established, then we can build and start making conclusions from that. But when you have an abstract idea that doesn't have boundaries, that doesn't have definition, you can't really draw any conclusions from it because it's not, it's not real in the first place. How would we know that? To say that the orb floating in the air is a ghost implies a connection between the orb and the ghost. But there's been no ghost established. That's why they're hunting for them. So whatever evidence they're finding, until they establish that that evidence actually connects to ghosts, it's all just theater. That's what religion is.

John Dehlin [01:00:00] And I was kind of, and I don't know if this is applicable, but I was just, I was thinking about how often it's easy for Mormon apologetics and non believing Mormons to debate about horses and steel in the Book of Mormon.

Carah Burrell [01:00:16] That's what I was going to say.

John Dehlin [01:00:17] When? Yeah, when. Like we know that Adam and Eve weren't the first humans by science, and we know that the Tower of Babel didn't happen. And the whole Jaredite narrative depends on Adam and Eve and a Tower of Babel and a global flood with Noah. And so that kind of kills the whole Jaredite narrative in The Book of Mormon. But then also the whole Nephite narrative is also based on, you know, Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And we don't know if even Moses or Abraham existed. That really has not been established. In fact, even Jews don't, you know, secular or even, let's just say educated Jews aren't even sure if Abraham or Moses really existed. So we're way down. We're way down the stack talking about whether Book of Mormon is historical, when all of the historical foundations that the Book of Mormon supposedly built on are in and of themselves completely fraught and problematic. Is that reification, John, or is that a different.

John Larsen [01:01:19] Definitely in there. And oftentimes reification leads to circular arguments because you use the conclusions to draw the proof. Again, our ghost hunters. I felt the cold spot and my mind became a stupor. And I thought, in the Ghost hunter show, I was watching this shows how stupid human beings are, what I'm about to tell you. So for a lot of years, they would put up these boom mics in these supposedly haunted houses, right? And the audio quality was not great, so there was always static. And then in that, they'd say, oh, I heard a voice. Somebody said, danger. And then they play it over again on the tape, and then you'd have all this noise. They would say, you see, hear that, hear that, hear that? Somebody said, live. Well, the audio equipment has gotten too good. It doesn't have any static. So I am not shitting you, dear listener. They actually carry around static boxes with them now. And when they're searching for ghosts, they press play on the static box. And then when they go back and look at the tape, they listen. They listen for the ghost talking amongst the static, because that worked for them before until their audio equipment got. Got too good. Again, this is from the assumption that there's even a ghost there in the first place. So what Mormons will do is they'll put a concept in place. They'll say, Joseph Smith was a prophet. Well, how do we know he was a prophet? Because he translated the Book of Mormon from the golden plates. Okay, well, how do we know the golden plates are real? Well, because Joseph Smith found them and he's a prophet. Well, how do we know he's a prophet? Because he translated them from the golden plates. It leads to that circular reasoning. But the reason the circle is there is because both arguments depend on one another. And neither of them are established. Neither of them have actually been proven. And that's for me. That's all I need. To know that Joseph Smith is not a prophet because there isn't any external proof outside of him other than what he or his buddies have said. So once you start making conclusions based on the fact that Joseph Smith is a prophet, that is the entirety of Mormon theology. It's all fallacious. It's all a fallacy, which is why I'm always saying on this. It's all make believe. It's all a construction because it's built on concepts that aren't real or haven't been established as being real. Faith, hope, charity. Those are all concepts that aren't defined. Even love, which we can attract to chemical stuff, is. Is still a little bit fuzzy. Right. So. So the problem is when you strip Mormonism away and start art taking back to its foundation, you come to a foundation that actually doesn't exist. Sorry, I keep striking the mic. It doesn't exist. It is based on the. The conclusions from assuming that conclusion is already there.

Carah Burrell [01:04:26] Yeah, I love that ghost hunter example because I think we can kind of all relate to that. That's kind of outside the scope of. Of Mormonism. And if you're able to have an outsider perspective, you can see these arguments. That's what it's so good about. Talking about, like fallacious reasoning and talking about it in a different context. That's not as triggering for somebody who's religious. And what's funny is I mentioned that, like, I used to watch Ghost Hunters when I was like in eighth grade, and I was so enthralled by it. And once I told my friend Paige, like, they did this thing and like when the wires, when they cross these wires like this, that's when there was a ghost there. And that's how you know there was a ghost. There is when they crossed that. And she said to me, and she's like, they just said, that's when there's a ghost there. Like, that's not a known thing. That, like wires cross and do this on camera when ghosts are there. And I was like, you're right. And now she's still Mormon and I'm not. But anyway. But I love that example. Then the same one about Joseph Smith. Like, do you guys remember in the, like the Gospel topic Topics essays, a lot of people have lost their testimony because we understand fallacious reasoning. Like, we're not stupid. So when we see it in our face, like in the Gospel Topics essays, it'll say, Joseph Smith used like this Urim and Thummim, and he put a rock and a hat and a lot of Past prophets have used different devices to be able to communicate with God and get revelations and everyone's like, have they though have. Did Joseph. What, what? Did he ever actually get any communications? What did he do with this stone? Oh, he was a treasure digger with that. Did he ever find any treasure with it? Oh no, he didn't. Like that screams to you that like the very premise that the church kind of is bringing awareness to of like do messages actually come through stones and hats though? And the church is just like, yeah, sure, just ask like you know, old prophets in the olden days. And everybody who reads the gospel topics essays that I know is like red alert, red flags going off. You know, you just know that that's not right intuitively.

John Larsen [01:06:14] Right. I think it's a great example and it's why most people can't get out of the house of mirrors.

Carah Burrell [01:06:20] Sure.

John Larsen [01:06:20] Because there is no exit to the house of mirrors. You have to smash the glass. Once you smash the glass, you can find your way out easily. But as long as you're accepting these premises that are actually conclusions that don't, that don't actually have any argument behind them, they're just people who have asserted certain things. Your example of hat, rocks and hats is, is fantastic because they use, say, well, other prophets have done this. Well, can you find somebody who's not a prophet that does this or is this just something that prophets, that prophets do?

Carah Burrell [01:06:55] I've seen some charlatans do it. Like I've seen some people in like back alleyways who have like different card tricks that, that seems more familiar. Like Occam's razor again comes into play of like, is it more likely that he's a prophet or is it more likely that he's like a trickster? Because that is more what I'm leaning towards. That seems like like the late least amount of conjecture needed tells me it's the more nefarious one.

John Larsen [01:07:17] Yeah, and I think another tell will tell is that nobody ever gets convinced by these to join the church. Well, I can't say nobody, I'm talking in superlatives, but when you talk to people who've converted the church, it's usually like, yeah, I found a community when they were telling me about Joseph Smith and I felt really good. They took me to the temple and I felt peace there. I suddenly had people who cared about my well being. I've been able to do a calling. I got off of heroin. I have a community. I'm going back to college, you know, you know, all that, all that stuff but none of it has to do at all with the fact that Joseph Smith was a. Was a prophet. That. That. That's just out there.

Carah Burrell [01:08:02] Yeah, that's very true. We don't start with apologetics and work our way backwards very often.

John Larsen [01:08:06] Correct. All right, our next one. Argumentum Ignorantium. This is a very important one. This is the appeal to ignorance. Now you probably feel like I'm gonna make some kind of dunning Kruger sort of thing or whatever. I'm not. This is a fallacy that says basically if the argument has not been proven false, I. E. We're ignorant of why the argument is false, then the argument is true. That is a fallacy. Just not being able to disprove something or not having any evidence that it's not true, not untrue, is not evidence that is in fact true.

Appeal to Ignorance and Absence of Evidence

John Dehlin [01:08:48] Interesting. So the. So the. Let's see, is there a way to restate that? Is it sort of the. Is it the. For sure, absence of evidence?

John Larsen [01:09:00] The. The. The. A great example of this is the BYU professor who believes in the missing link of evolution. I've heard them say this to me themselves. They say every quarter in classes which they will teach evolution. And then they will say at some point we are going to get some piece of knowledge that will connect these two theories and all truth will be circumscribed into one great hole that we're missing some critical piece of information. We're ignorant of some piece of information, therefore the argument might still be true. It's not. It's not an argument at all. So. So. Or let's use the South America example. Everything we discover about the Inca and the Maya shows us that they are not the people described in the Book of Mormon. And. And apologists who know what they're talking about will actually acknowledge that. But they will say we just haven't unburied it yet. The proof of the South American connection to the Book of Mormon is waiting there underneath some jungle. And some of them will make an argument. They say it'll happen right at the last days because it's important that it's all confusion and the devil can run the world and we can't have proof that the Church is true. So therefore God has hidden this piece of information that will make everything connect together. Just because we do not have a proof that something is not true doesn't make it true. You'd have to somehow make it make some other argument to suggest that it is true.

Carah Burrell [01:10:39] And tell me the name again. What was the name of that one?

John Larsen [01:10:41] This Is the argumentum ad ignorantium or the appeal to ignorance, is that similar

Carah Burrell [01:10:50] to the God of the gaps fallacy or is it different?

John Larsen [01:10:52] It is very much the God of the gaps fallacy.

Carah Burrell [01:10:54] Okay. That we don't know exactly what is going on here, but I'm going to chalk it up to it's got to be my deity. My deity did that, your deity did something else. But definitely mine is real. Kind of like I'm filling in the gaps of why something happened.

John Larsen [01:11:07] And a stark naked view of that is I'm asserting the truth that I've already accepted based on the fact that there hasn't been evidence disproving it on this aspect yet.

Carah Burrell [01:11:19] Yeah, and I think that's a good one for the outsider test for faith and things like that, where if you would accept that argument for your religion, but would you accept it for somebody else's religion? And I've posed this to my parents before who they had very like powerful, like they. My mom fasted for three days before she like joined the church, before she really wanted to know it was true. And she said she had a very powerful, overwhelming, like shaking experience that the church was true. And I asked her though, but if somebody on the other side of the planet had a really strong like emotional reaction after fasting and they joined Islam or Buddhism or something else, like why? We don't know the reason. Maybe, maybe because they were fasting, we don't know the reason that their body had that reaction. But to chalk it up to that, your deity is the absolute true one. And then you're never going to let any other new inputs of information. We just don't know the answer. It's hard to assign an actual reason for it happening until we get more information. Is that kind of, is that that argument?

John Larsen [01:12:15] Well, believers just pretend they believe stuff like that because you could go call your mom right now and say, mom, I have been fasting for three days. I just met this guy named Bob and I feel that I need to leave my husband and my kids and go with Bob. And you could throw exactly the same validation that she used to arrive at the church is true. And there's no way she would say, you know what, you're right, because that's exactly how I determined the church was true. Like, nobody accepts that as a valid measure. They all use it as a post hocus argument for why they did it. And, and, and so I'm saying not only will I not accept the fact that you had an emotional experience that shows you the church is true, I'm saying that you won't accept it if I use the exact same. The exact same steps. Everything you say to arrive at some conclusion you don't want me to. It is not convincing at all.

Carah Burrell [01:13:10] Right, Right. Yeah. If you arrive at something else besides the conclusion, at the end of the day, the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints is true restored. If you have any other output. Like I had a crazy emotional experience that tied me to this other deity. And actually the fruits of this new religion I'm following is twice as good. We give 50 times more to charity. My life is better, my marriage is better, and I had a spiritual experience to boot. Like that told me that this is the way to go. If it doesn't end at the conclusion, your parents or whoever wants you to start with that. The Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints is the true one. It's invalid.

John Larsen [01:13:47] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can see that kind of connectedness comes everywhere. Like soldiers in combat together. Although they're in a miserable, hellish situation, they never want to go back into describe the relationship they have with their. With their brothers in arms, their fellow soldiers, as an almost quasi spiritual language. This connection, this band of brothers, a sense of belonging that is a product of our psychology. It's just the shysters come in and say, hey, that thing that you're feeling right now, that's the spirit. And you know what? I'm your bishop and the spirit talks to me before he talks to you. And you know what? The spirit also tells me what you should do. Run. When somebody says that. Run. Go, run as fast as you can. But I want you to see those two things we just kind of talked about. The argument about Ignorantium, the appeal to ignorance and reification. Between those two things, you can construct ginormous walls of bullshit that you just circle back on itself. You just keep making up definitions to new words. You just keep doing things. And people just get. Their minds just get so tangled like a taffy pole that they can't think straight. I was in that for 34 years. I couldn't think straight. I could think straight on things outside the church, but these sort of things had my mind so twisted back on itself that it took years of study and careful understanding to deprogram this shit. Because once you start, like you take your scriptures and take a red pencil like we used to, and then start crossing out every word, that. That is an argument from. From the gaps, from the ignorance. It's an argument's reification. It's a. It's the assuming properties of something that has never been established. And by the end of the day, you'll have red lined out 80% of that book.

John Dehlin [01:15:49] Yeah. And John, if I'm. If I'm trying to kind of piece this together, like, I'm thinking of a recent interview we did with the Christian. I'm thinking Randy, where it seemed like when he was talking about the Big Bang, and oftentimes when Christians talk about, like, how incredible nature is, you know, how in the world can a bumblebee fly if its wings aren't, you know, robust enough to carry its weight? Or how in the world did this universe just spring up from what appears to be nothing? Ergo, there must be a God, and that's God of the gaps. But. But so much. Or even if somebody, you know is healed, let's just say someone's sick and they say a prayer, or their parents say a prayer, and then the person gets better. The truth is, we haven't really done any analysis to figure out what actually made the person get better. It may have been time, it may have been something they ate, it may have been some other factor that we aren't aware of, but we too easily just jump to God or faith as the explanation. But then from there, once you've made that jump, that there is a supreme being and that he created all things and that he's looking over us. And then you can also get people to just accept wholesale the creation narrative and the Old Testament and thus the New Testament. You can get people debating about, well, how in the world can the Book of Mormon if how in the world could Joseph Smith or an uneducated farm boy have manufactured that book from scratch? And you can get people arguing about the details of the book when the truth is that's sitting upon this massive foundation that's built of both beginning with the God of the gaps, and then a lot of false principles stacked on top of each other via reification, such that you get people arguing about the bark on a tree and they can never step back and actually see that the forest is actually false or manufactured because they're too busy arguing about the bark on one of the trees. Does that.

John Larsen [01:18:04] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:18:05] Is that kind of. Is that a way. Is that illustrating at all what you're trying to say?

John Larsen [01:18:09] Yeah, the whole thing's a clusterfuck. And it's just. It's just a mess. And our minds are messy. Our minds are really messy. And these things are not like this evil person's tool case. These are flaws in our brain chemistry that we've identified over the last few thousand years. And if you're a shyster, if you're selling something, you want something from people, you use these things, we use them just all the time to manipulate one another incessantly. We use them against our children, we use them against our spouses, we use them against our parents. We're very manipulative, we're very deceptive as a species. And you have to very carefully unpack all this stuff because your example is pretty good. But you're still talking about trees which I can go walk into and I can lick one, I can put my hand on it. But really religious people are talking about midichlorians and stuff like that. They're always just talking about nonsense. That's why I find like theology to be really hard to study because it's all just nonsense on nonsense on nonsense on nonsense.

Carah Burrell [01:19:18] Yeah. And to that point like the bigger picture of why we do so many of the things that we do in Mormon stories and the point that we're trying to explain here to me at least is the bigger picture is that these ideas that people are trapped within have ramifications. Have ramifications of you have your Mormon parents and your, you know, 16 year old son comes out as gay. Like the way people treat one another is locked within these logical fallacies. And I get really annoyed and have a lot, I have empathy for people who are stuck in these. But also at the end of the day I get really annoyed too because like John Larsen just said, like these are some ancient ideas about, we're talking about angels, we're talking about ancient prophets affecting the way that like gay people get treated today. And we're locking ourself on a train that's being like steered by some like stone age philosophy. Like are we kidding ourselves here? Like we know we don't put up with these fallacies in so many other areas. We can recognize them when it's not our religion that's being talked about. So let's do talk about our faith. Let's talk about our faith, our politics, our everything. If it affects the way that we treat people, the way we vote, the way we are citizens in this world. So it's just, I just want a thousand foot view, ten thousand foot view. This stuff is really important.

John Dehlin [01:20:24] Yeah. And I, and I'll add to that, Carah, that was great. And I'll add to it when I hear, you know, FARMS and Maxwell Institute and fair Mormon apologists arguing for a limited geography theory against Rodney Meldrum and the heartland theory. Apologists arguing for a large geography Book of Mormon theory that incorporates North, Central and South America. What comes to my mind is arguing about whether hobbits can kill elves or dwarves and who's stronger, Harry Potter or Iron Man? Because it all seems to be almost like Comic Con absurdity. Who's stronger, Hulk or Thor? And can Hulk smash Thor or can Thor's hammer smash Hulk? And it's all kind of silliness because it's all built on superstitious foundations that have no. Have never established, not even that there's a God, let alone that Moses and Abraham lived, let alone that Jesus lived, let alone that Jesus was resurrected, let alone that an angel delivered gold plates to Joseph, let alone that they were ever Nephites and Lamanites, let alone that there was ever either one or two hills of Camorra.

Carah Burrell [01:21:51] The only evidence we have is that this life is real, that we're actually living this one. And you could probably love a lot of the people around here better if you deconstructed some of these ideas.

John Larsen [01:22:02] But anyway, that's a great example, John. And the last couple of years, we saw something quite incredible happen when Covid unleashed itself on the world. What we saw is a really amazingly quick arrival at the vaccine. It was very quick in terms of calendar time. In actuality, if you add a person, hours. The amount of work that was done there was. It's, It's. I've talked to some scientists and people are involved. There's probably the best researched, quickest, most collaborative vaccine effort ever on the place, on the face of the planet. And why this is important is that you could take Chinese scientists, Russian scientists, American scientists, European scientists, and they all spoke the same language, even though they spoke literally different languages. They came from world views that were very different. But they were sharing the genome sequencing, they were collaborating, they were publishing their work faster than they normally do. There was just this huge amount of collaboration. I think when future generations tell the story of COVID it'd be this, this miraculous triumph of science. Let's compare that to Rodney Meldrum. If you took somebody who was not schooled in Mormonism, but knew very, was. Was a scholar of, Of. Of the ancient American peoples, the aboriginal Americans, they would have no fucking clue what Rodney's talking about at all. It's just all of this imaginary, like you say, it's Thor versus Loki. It's not based in any kind of science. But he presents it wrapping himself in the language of science, wrapping himself in the language of history, as if this is something that's not just fiction, but the fact that it's not communicable to anybody who's not already in that paradigm shows that the paradigm is probably not true in this case. No, probably. It is absolutely not true.

John Dehlin [01:24:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is important stuff, John.

John Larsen [01:24:23] Yeah, go ahead.

John Dehlin [01:24:24] No, keep going.

The Definist Fallacy and Redefining Terms

John Larsen [01:24:26] I got one last fallacy for tonight. Okay, this is the definist D E F I N I S T fallacy. This is basically insisting that your definition of a word is the correct one. It is actually a kissing cousin to reification. Because what you do is you define out the term the way you want it to be, and then from there you can make arguments. My dear wife teaches English in school and she always has to. Well, when she was in Utah, she always had to unpack a certain term. And that term is virtue. Because the students in Utah who grew up in Mormon culture believe virtue is about

John Dehlin [01:25:21] sex.

John Larsen [01:25:22] Sex. So the church has redefined the word virtue. The virtue word, virtue came from the Greeks and they wrote about it quite a bit. For them, virtue, the Greeks had four aspects of it. Temperance, prudence, courage, and justice. Now, one could argue that temperance, sex falls under temperance, but the Greeks believed in moderation. So teetotaling would be foreign to the, to the Greek concept of virtue. So Mormons have redefined a word and then they go and they talk out in the world using the word virtue. But they've got their own special definitions for it that are packed up. And this is kind of the one I want to finish off with this because it's a trick that uses a lot of the other tricks we've already talked about. It's a straw man. You take and define the words exactly the way you want and you cut out any of the messiness around the edges. It is this oftentimes reification, where you're taking concepts that are not proven, they're just theoretical, and then you're packing them into language and speaking about them as if they're concrete realities. Oftentimes you're. Yeah, that's good enough. So the church does it with all their tiny little definitions that they define things out, like the word apostate, which is funny, when I read this article and you see all the weasel language they start throwing in here as they create their own wink and nod definitions. Apostates sometimes become enemies of the church. That's true, but so does the church become enemies of the Catholic Church. So here we're using words, we're putting definitions. Apostasy, then they're implying is somebody who is an enemy of the church. But can we say Mormons are Catholic apostates? Because that would fill their definition of that. Because Mormonism is specifically and categorically against Catholicism and working to overturn Catholicism, literally. We love sending missionaries to Catholic countries in particular to try to get them to abandon their Catholic faith. Are Mormons the enemies of Catholicism, I ask you?

John Dehlin [01:27:41] Yes, but they don't want to admit that these days.

John Larsen [01:27:45] I agree. Leaving the church which claims to be God's official church. God's official church. Who cares that the church claims to be God's official church? I punched Larry in the face. Who claims to be the reincarnation of Vishnu? Who cares? Like, what does that do with my fist? Like, you see, you see the kind of sleight of hand they're doing? Leaving the church which claims to be God's official church, containing the fullness of the gospel. Why is that clause even in this sentence? Because they're trying to establish through definition without defining. So remember I told you this is written by PhDs. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to do the same thing lawyers do. They state things to try to get those words next to each other in your mind. Containing the fullness the gospel often results in feelings of guilt. I just throw. Cut that up. Let me read it one more time. Leaving the church which claims to be God's official church contains. Containing the fullness of the gospel often results in feelings of guilt. So, so, so what? We. We put guilt in all sorts of people. There's people who feel guilty if they eat before anybody else does. There's people who feel guilty because we're chopping down the Amazon rainforest. There's people who feel guilty because they're driving around a car that burns gas. That has no bearing on anything. That ex Mormons feel guilty. And I'll tell you one thing, if there's one thing I do know about Mormons, is that they feel guilty about stuff all the time. While many return, others develop a need to defend their actions. So what Mormons do is not defending their actions. That's what apostates do. While many return, others develop a need to defend their actions, disprove they have in quotes the church or become hostile enemies. Well, aren't Mormons themselves trying to disprove apostasy? Isn't that what they're doing right here? Why is disproving the church a sin, but disproving apostasy is not a sin? Why are we apostates? Enemies. But they're not enemies to us. They're playing all these fallacy games and they're throwing all this stuff in. The fruits of apostasy are generally bitter. If I had a PhD candidate, whoever fucking wrote this and they put that in their thing, they'd be immediately kicked out of the program.

John Dehlin [01:30:13] Right. Why?

John Larsen [01:30:16] That sentence right there. The fruits of apostasy are generally bitter. That's just sophistry. There's nothing in there that has any ring of truth. It's just pure vile. It's just saying things that are mean. It does. Nothing in there means anything. There's no Mormon definition of bitterness or, or being vile. Right. I mean, or whatever. The. The fruits of. Are generally bitter. There's nothing in there. The bitterness has to do with. With leaving the church. They're just using negative connotation to put a negative stink on ex Mormons. They're. They're doing a straw man here. They're doing. They're using language. They're doing everything they can to not actually say anything in here. When you get done reading this, who are they talking about? They're talking about no one's. They're talking about everyone. The Book of Mormon warns of unfavorable conditions, the result from transgression contrary to light and knowledge. What's light? What do you mean light? What are you talking about? Define your terms. They won't.

John Dehlin [01:31:24] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:31:24] Anyway, I did. I just. I read that paragraph because you can see these things in there. And if we were to go on for another 50 fallacies, you'd see them just interweaving these, these, These blankets of fallacy, which is so hard for. For people who are really seeking truth. I told you before, I. I have no religion other than I seek truth. And if you can prove me wrong, I will admit it. That's all I care about is what is real, what is true. And, and this stuff here that we read from the Church is as far away from truth, basically, as you can get.

Carah Burrell [01:32:01] Yeah. Definitely isn't loving. We'll start there. Everyone knows the re. It's just. It's dumb divisive language to even put that in there. They could have just said apostates are people who leave the church. The end. But that's not advantageous to their goals, which is to demonize and put us versus them. Othering language in there. That's not loving. Everyone knows. Everyone is. Every Mormon knows somebody who left the church. Church. Hey, LDS Church. Why? What ad. What is advantageous to you to demonize people who leave? I can guess a few. It's not helpful and loving and it's not Christlike and it's not what Christ taught and it is tearing families apart.

John Dehlin [01:32:39] Well, that goes back to the ad hominem fallacy because they want to attack people who leave the church to discredit them. Because the most dangerous, you know, the most dangerous person to an organization is someone who used to be a part of that organization and who can speak from an insider perspective about what's going wrong inside. It's, it's the, it's kind of the reverse of the bandwagon effect. The bandwagon effect is hey, everybody's doing it, so I want to join if everybody's doing it. Well, if everybody's leaving and having a bad experience with it, then a lot of people are going to want to leave like rats fleeing sinking ship. And so they need to defame. I mean, you know, apostates are literally the most dangerous people, threats to an organization. So they've got to use the ad hominem fallacy to try and save their own tail.

John Larsen [01:33:32] Yeah, go ahead, Carah.

Carah Burrell [01:33:34] I was just gonna say what's the fallacy of our tick tock getting taken down that now we can't even talk on tick tock anymore? If you guys don't know our tech talk's been down for a while. We might not get it back, but we might. But yeah, just to John's credit, just to his point that it's really rough when we have. Letting people tell their own stories in their own words is just, it is too problematic for a trillion dollar church. So they're having this little thing out of this studio just always trying to let, not let people speak their truth. You know, that's just the way, only way that it's going to continue. But John Larsen.

John Dehlin [01:34:08] John, I was going to just say really quickly, isn't another just classic example? Well, I can think of two. One you don't like and one you may like a little more. We've talked a lot about how the church was finding horses in the Book of Mormon to be inconvenient. And so they tried to redefine horse to potentially include the possibility of a taper. And that was just one theory that was advanced. But I also, I've heard them try and redefine terms like steel or sword to be other types of relics that they were able to find in Mesoamerica during the time of the Book of Mormon. So those are some examples that. John, you may not be big fans of the, the, I think the classic apologetic example of Redefining terms is now that, now that it's clear that Joseph failed on four translations, four scriptural translations, Joseph Smith failed on. He failed. The Book of Mormon is clearly not a translation because it's just clearly a 19th century document. And nobody, even, even now, Bushman and, and Mason and Givens, you know, all of the modern neo apologists are going to agree that the Book of Mormon looks a lot more like a 19th century document than anything ancient and Mesoamerican. So that's kind of failure number one on Joseph Smith. Failure number two, translation scripture of Joseph Smith is the Book of Abraham. We all know that that's no longer a translation. The Joseph Smith translation of the New Testament has now been found to be a forgery of the Adam Smith commentary. And then if that weren't enough, the Kinderhook plates are also a false translation because Joseph tried to describe what those plates were. When it turns out that people trying to fool Joseph Smith manufactured fake plates so they could expose him as a charlatan. So there's four failures in Joseph Smith's ability to translate. So what do apologists do? John Larsen, have you been plugged in lately to see how they're, how they're solving this translation problem? No.

John Larsen [01:36:16] No. What, do they have a new one?

John Dehlin [01:36:18] Yeah, they're changing. They're changing. They had, when I was at Utah State University, they had an entire two day academic professional conference at an R1 Division 1 major research university about what the word translation means. And maybe the word translation, maybe what Joseph said he was translating, he was meaning something else. And Richard Bushman went to Harvard. Terrell Givens was like, you know, as a professor, you know, he went to, I don't know, Syracuse or Cornell, somewhere fancy. They've got people like Jana Reese and Patrick Mason and all these scholars that call themselves intellectuals up there trying to redefine the term translation because it's become really inconvenient.

Carah Burrell [01:37:11] Carah, I just wanted to say one of my favorite. I have this, I have this tweet saved on my desktop. I love it so much. From a Mormon, probably a Desnat person. On Twitter, they tweeted, what if God used Joseph Smith's imagination to create the Book of Mormon, but Joseph Smith thought it was an ancient document. That's a real thing. Jeez. Don't swear, Carah, don't swear. But that's a real thing that a Mormon thought and was like holding on so tightly to. And they thought that that idea deserved to go off to the Internet. That is how fallacious Reasoning is. And people do not recognize it. You would never put up with that with like Muhammad. You never put up with that with like Jim Jones, but you put up with that Joseph Smith, that his imagination is just so pure. He could. He didn't just like MARRY, you know, 40 women because he felt like it. It was because we're going to start back from the presupposition that the church is true and everything's always going to lead into that need to calm down.

John Larsen [01:38:07] You guys are all right. It's, it's, it's. Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:38:10] Go ahead, John and John, one other example that you may have missed as you were actually enjoying life in your post. Post Mormon life. There was this audio recording that I got in my hands a few years ago where this couple, Brooke and Josh, my friends, went to Spencer Fluman of the Maxwell Institute. He's still the head of the Maxwell Institute. And privately, Spencer Fluman is acknowledging that the Book of Mormon looks a lot more like a 19th century document than it does a translation of ancient Mesoamerican records. And what Spencer Fluman tells my friends Josh and Brooke are that maybe the Book of Mormon wasn't Joseph Smith's grandest translation, it was Joseph Smith's grandest revelation. So the Church is actually moving in the direction of no longer referring to the Book of Mormon as a translation, but instead as a revelation. And that when Joseph Smith said translation, he meant revelation, which is also the Catalyst theory, which is that maybe when Joseph Smith said he was translating Egyptian papyrus into what is now the Book of Abraham, what he really was doing was he was revealing God's. That the, that the papyrus inspired Joseph to channel revelation from God. Are these things that are new to you, John? Why are you laughing? I made John Larsen laugh. Carah.

John Larsen [01:39:34] There's better discussions on the Battlestar Galactica forums, I swear. Okay, these, these so called professors. Yeah, I'm calling you fuckers out. These so called professors, there's three tracks in their life. There's fast and testimony meeting. There's scholarly, peer reviewed journals. Journals.

John Dehlin [01:39:57] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:39:58] And then there's this weird bastardized up apologetic space where they all play slap and tickle with each other. Okay, you find me one of those that they're John Larsen.

John Dehlin [01:40:12] Watch your language.

Carah Burrell [01:40:13] Oh, he gets to say it. Yeah.

John Larsen [01:40:16] Their testimony, okay, matches what they put in peer reviewed journals. One of them. And then I'll listen to them. But they're full of it. They don't even. Even the ones that you like, like Terrell Givens. I guarantee you he doesn't get up in testimony meeting and say all the stuff that he puts in his books that is this, this echo chamber to slough off the intelligent people.

John Dehlin [01:40:44] Now I'm no longer. I'm no longer. I mean, Terrell and Fiona, I hear, can be lovely people. In private, I'm sure they're great people,

John Larsen [01:40:52] but I'm not all these professors. I'm calling names. I'm sure I would enjoy their company. I'm sure they're lovely human beings. I'm saying professionally, socially and religiously. They are morally bankrupt. And I'm showing you how. Because their life is a church and their profession. And then they have this third thing, right? And that's what we're talking about. That's why I'm laughing. We're talking about this, this group masturbation, these circle jerks that they do. But I want to see it bookmarked by what they say they say in church and what they say in the peer reviewed journals. Because they're just playing games or what

Carah Burrell [01:41:35] do you think about this example? For instance, last week we had Sandra Tanner on and then we're having her on again this week and we went through a podcast that John, by the way, and Hank Smith. Yeah. And church historian Kate Holbrooke. They did two part series about Joseph's polygamy. And we found it really frightening and problematic that they left out every single thing that could be deemed problematic about the way justice practice polygamy, about all of the more uncomfortable parts of section 132. And we know that they know that they're leaving everything out. And they know that we people at Mormon Stories and whoever else is going to look at that and call them out, but they do it anyway to the kind of like, to your circle jerk point is like, if we don't hold them accountable, sorry for being like dirty rotten apostates, like if we don't do it at some point nobody's going to. Because you guys talked about this on a podcast for three hours and you didn't mention all of the problems with 132. You only highlighted the ones that make you feel kind of warm and fuzzy. And that just reminds me, like, they know the information. They know that that's that they know that they're technically lying by withholding the truth. And then they also get mad at apostates for sounding bitter because we're just kind of holding your feet to the fire that you know better and should do better. That's my biggest frustration.

How Apologists Use These Fallacies in Practice

John Larsen [01:42:57] They're religious people. They do what religious people do. If religion were true, we'd call it science. So people who pursue truth are called scientists. People who pursue falsehood are called religious. So we, we, we. We're kind of in the circle jerk too, because we keep pointing out, these guys keep doing this thing over and over again. What do we expect them to do? It's in their nature. If they, if they were, if they were students of truth, they would leave the church. They wouldn't stay in. These aren't people who care about truth. Also, they're care about being right. They care about being on the winning team. Sorry, John Quinn.

John Dehlin [01:43:30] Yeah, yeah. And they care about reinforcing the church's authority and they care about their jobs

John Larsen [01:43:35] and they care about their religion status and all that.

John Dehlin [01:43:37] Yeah, yeah. And that's so offensive to someone like Patrick Mason or Richard Bushman or Terrell Givens to say that they're not sincere. Like, they would say, hey, John Larsen, I will give you credit that you're sincere. We're not just, you know, bought off by our jobs or our status. We actually also give us the, Give us the respect of assuming our sincerity, just like we're willing to assume you're sincere. So they don't like it. They, they, it is, it is reasonable that they don't like it when we call into question their motives or call them mfers.

Carah Burrell [01:44:13] By the way, John's gonna continue.

John Dehlin [01:44:15] By the way, by the way, isn't that ad hominem? Like, don't we have to be careful as ex Mormons not to discredit Richard Bushman or Terrell Givens or Fiona Givens or Patrick Mason or Spencer Fluman? Because aren't we attacking the person when we say that their, their motives are attacked the person.

John Larsen [01:44:33] Thank you for bringing that up, John. Let's go back to the beginning. Fallacies only occur when one is making an argument. One is making an assertion. So these guys have all these magical assertions they're making. I'm not making any assertion. I have no constraint. I don't have to follow any kind of. All I have to do is disprove their, their logical fallacies and then I disprove their position. So, so if I say, hey, that guy over there is a jerk, it's not a fallacy. If I said, hey, that guy over there, you can't trust his quote on re my house because he's a jerk, that's a fallacy.

John Dehlin [01:45:15] But if, but if Richard Bushman and Terrell Givens and Patrick Mason, if they're trying to argue the church is true and the Book of Mormon is historical. And then we say no, but their reputations and their income are tied to their positions. Aren't we undermining their arguments by calling into question their character and their integrity and their sincerity?

John Larsen [01:45:39] I think I'm giving them an out. Yeah, you're saying they're sincere. And I say it's not helping their case. You're saying, okay, there's these guys out here who went to Ivy League schools who are professors forever. They've read all this stuff, they know all the stuff, but they sincerely want to lean into the lie. Then my assassinating their character is better than my assassin their intelligence, isn't it? Because either, either they're, they're so. John, are you saying they're stupid? That's what I'm hearing. You're saying they're not smart enough to figure it out. Because that's why I call them names. Because I say they are smart enough to figure it out. I say I've read Bushman. I know that guy's got a brain on him. And I know he's, he's arrived at a conclusion that's not supported by his own arguments.

John Dehlin [01:46:29] Yeah, bring it.

John Larsen [01:46:30] Bring him on with me. But we'll talk.

John Dehlin [01:46:33] Yeah, the, the other thing, John, names. Right, right, right. And they won't come on because that's one of the sign of a really weak argument is Patrick Mason or Spencer Fluman or Richard Bushman will say they don't come on Mormon stories because our tone has changed, because we're too negative, because we're too critical cleavage.

Carah Burrell [01:46:52] Like they're just so annoying.

John Larsen [01:46:53] So, okay, so they, they were academics in, in the Ivy League League and they're too tender hearted to come on to like a two bit podcast. No, they have everything to. Look, this is why they won't come on. They have everything to lose and nothing to gain. They will win nothing by arguing with me. Yeah, but they know about like 45. They don't, they don't care about, they don't know who I am. But people like me, we have, we have 800 ways to decimate their arguments. And they have nothing to stand on. Nothing. So they, they go into their, their holy sepulchers, they go into their chapels. They, they talk in places where they can't be touched. They, they retire. You know, look at all the stuff John Gee has written in, in journals about Egyptian Egyptology. He doesn't have any. They won't publish him.

Carah Burrell [01:47:41] All right, let me ask you a question then. John Larsen. Because we do have a very interesting apologist that does come in. We had Rodney, Rod Meldrum on, like, last week, and we're having him again.

John Larsen [01:47:51] This, you know, I I up with Rod a couple years ago. He's a nice guy. He and I would have great beers together.

Carah Burrell [01:47:58] Yeah. If he. If only. But, yeah, but. So to the. I just want to mention the opposite point. There are some people who, I think Rod obviously has very, very weak arguments, and I'll tell him that to his face and I will point them out at dinner and I will say that that is a non sequitur. Saying to me, Rod, that, like, we know that Nephi built a ship because Phoenicians built ship. That is not helping. He told me also, like, we know that Nephi built a ship because his brothers in the Book of Mormon said, nephi, you can't build a ship. Aha. They knew what ships were. So I'll tell him to his face that his arguments are fallacious, but that doesn't change anything. He's still going to come back on another day. So what am I supposed to do with that? I can point out his fallacious arguments to his face all day, every day. It's never going to change his mind.

John Larsen [01:48:47] Well, and, and thank you, John, for calling me out. I'm, I'm. I crossed the line. I did. I shouldn't, I shouldn't be dropping names like that. I, I angry not because of them. I get angry because of the damage they cause, because they use that, that, that education they have. They use those credentials to, to then fool a lot of people who get hurt by this whole thing. Mormonism is very destructive psychologically for people inside. Now, you know when you were, you were talking about, why does the church vilify ex Mormons? Because they vilify Mormons too. Like, why do you have to get a new temple recommend every two years? Why do you have to go to tithing settlement? Why do you have to constantly repent? Why do you have to confess your sins to the church? Listen to the way the Church talks to its members. Doesn't like ex Mormons interest ex Mormons? Because it doesn't like Mormons. The whole point of the whole thing is that you're all worms and you all can't survive in life without us. And you'd all be broken and rapey and dead in a ditch if it weren't for the Church. Church doesn't respect any of us. So it's the fact that these guys are using whatever intellectual power they have to Promote this system, this destructive, terrible, harmful system. It needs to go away and they need to stop. And what they're doing is serious, which is why I come back them with serious words. What they're doing matters. It's not just like everybody's just trying their best. They're not trying their best. It's not easy to publish a book. It takes a lot of work. So you don't get a free pass of just saying, oh, he's just sharing his view with the world.

John Dehlin [01:50:31] Yeah. And John, I'll going back to. Not only do they not publish their stuff in incredible peer review journal journals or testimony. Yeah. Not only do they not come on any appear anywhere where critics could actually ask them credible questions. What, what we also have is kind of private speak and public speak. It's because what Spencer Fluman is willing to say to a couple who's lost their testimony behind closed doors in his office, what Terrell and Fiona Givens are willing to say when they're at a special fireside that is limited people in attendance where there's no recorders being made, what Richard Bushman's willing to say in a basement at a faith again, you know, get together in Salt Lake City where he makes the comment that, that, you know, the prevailing narrative is. Is incorrect, that it's not true, that it's broken, and that the brother need to come up with a new prevailing narrative. Whenever you actually record what they're saying in private and then share it publicly, they, they go bananas, they lose and they tell you that it's mean and rude to record them in private. How dare you share something that was, that was recorded and meant for a private audience. And anytime you've got that double speak where you're not willing to say publicly what you're clearly willing to say privately, it usually is a pretty good indication that you're not standing on solid ground. And that, and this is. John, you could tell us about what happened when, during the Smoot hearings, when they asked Joseph F. Smith as he was a prophet, do you want to remind us what, what he said?

John Larsen [01:52:24] His tone was much more subdued. They asked him about revelation and if he talks to God and all that kind of stuff, and he kind of just weaseled out of it.

John Dehlin [01:52:34] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And another, another example is when Gordon B. Hinckley is doing interviews, I guess, leading up to the Salt Lake Olympics, and they're asking him about polygamy and he says it's not doctrinal. And they ask him about theosis. What about men becoming Gods because the God makers became inconvenient. And he's like, well, we don't, we don't teach that.

John Larsen [01:52:56] We teach that.

John Dehlin [01:52:56] I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it. Right. And then, and then immediately when the Mormon world loses its mind because of Sunstone, then when Gordon B. Hinckley's at the very next General Conference, he does that wink and a nod to the Mormon audience and says, you all know that I'm not confused about the doctrine. And everybody laughs. There's. There's kind of that double speak and it's, it's just a clear indication that they're speaking one way to one audience when it matters that they're wanting to sound intellectual, wanting to sound credible in front of their academic or, or social or, or world peers, global peers. They're going to say a whole bunch of different things than what they're going to say in private.

John Larsen [01:53:42] Yep. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

John Dehlin [01:53:45] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:53:45] And, and that privacy thing. I'm going to read you the first sentence of this apostate definition again. Members of the church vary in their levels of participation or belief. Latter Day Latter Day Saints who have seriously contravened or ignored Cardinal Church teachings, public or privately are considered a prostate apostates, whether or not they have officially left the church or affiliated with another religion. So they specifically say in there you could be an apostate for something you've been told in private that's not even a doctrine of the church. I mean, doesn't that, that should scare the bejesus out of everybody?

Carah Burrell [01:54:22] And also, isn't it weird that Joseph Smith would not. He'd be considered an apostate. He doesn't follow any of the rules of modern Mormonism. He wouldn't even recognize this church.

John Larsen [01:54:30] Well, he's a mystic. Mystics, Mystics are allowed to.

Carah Burrell [01:54:34] They're allowed to.

John Dehlin [01:54:35] Yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [01:54:37] So let me give a chance to repent a little bit. Terrell Givens By His Own Hand is a great book. I would recommend people, people read it before he wrote some of the other stuff. It's a fantastic believing and sympathetic approach to the problem of apostasy and how to deal with apostasy. He showed a lot of love and compassion for those who, who struggle. And I have to give him props for that. And I probably bust his ass too much here on this, on this show. Bushman was a great scholar and I enjoyed his works before Rough Stone Rolling more than I enjoyed Rough Stone Loring, which was just kind of boring to me. But the work that he did after that, I thought dishonored his previously scholarly work. But he's got great chops, a great understanding, and. And I would recommend to anybody in the church, apostate or not, to read what he's written. Who else did I slag? Rodney Meldum. He seems like a great guy. He's trying to make this whole nonsense work, but I'm sure. I'm sure he's. I'm sure he's a kick at a party.

Carah Burrell [01:55:50] We complimented him on his fundamentalism, actually, because he's more of a literalist with the text, which is fair enough. Like, that's what it says. That's what you believe. You're not weaseling out of it. Like, that's interesting.

John Larsen [01:56:01] I have a little dog. His name is Mo, and he's an. And he's like eight pounds of. Of fury. But Mo does. No, he's. He's a loving dog, except if anybody. If people start actually yelling at each other for real, or if anybody looks like there's never been, like, violence in my house, but, like, if. If, like, one of the kids will grab another kid, he will run up and bite them. He is violently opposed to violence. And I'm going to make my repentant appeal. That's what gets me going. It's the people in power who prey even inadvertently on people who are in stages of weakness, despair, need, all that kind of stuff. That's why I get so angry at these guys, because of what it does to so many people in the church. But they're human beings, and they are deserving of kindness and compassion, too. So. So please, dear listener, forgive me for going after them. I just get so frustrated with what they're doing because it doesn't make any sense to me because they have to know. They have to know what they're doing. And that's what irks me. That's what I want to ask them. People will think if I was there with them, I'd be like, what about this? What about this? I. I would just be like, how do you make this work? How do you make this reconcile with this? How do you do this? With this, you know?

Carah Burrell [01:57:27] Yeah, let me read Cherish's comment. I thought was great. They said, why am I not surprised that John has a dog? That's an. Too funny. Too funny.

John Larsen [01:57:38] We. We're attracted to each other.

Carah Burrell [01:57:41] All right, Non sequitur.

John Larsen [01:57:43] Or is it me and Mo? We're cut from the same.

Closing Reflections and Call to Support the Show

John Dehlin [01:57:48] All right, well, John, if I can summarize today, what I heard is we, we as ex Mormons, as believing Mormons, as orthodox Mormons, we need to ground ourselves, ground our arguments in logic, and we need to avoid falling prey to logical fallacies. And some of them are ad hominem, attacking the person instead of addressing the argument. Straw man. Setting up a fake argument that an opponent doesn't hold and then knocking it down as if you have accomplished something when you've actually just mischaracterized your opponent's argument. There's the no true Scotsman, which is kind of a purity argument. It's kind of like whenever a Republican says something Trump doesn't like, he calls him a rhino or. Or Republican in name only. That's an example of a no true Scotsman. Reification is building, building on ambiguity. Sort of a logical or a rational Tower of Babel that really is built on air as a foundation such that the more detailed arguments you're making are standing upon nothing. Be beware of. Of doing that and arguing from absence. Don't do that. Don't do the gap argument where there is no explanation. Ergo, fill in the. Fill in the gap with your favorite mystic or supernatural or ex Mormon apostate explanation. Don't do that. And don't. Don't redefine words. Don't fall prey to the deafness fallacy where you're basically just reinventing the human language, English language, or whatever language language it is you speak. If you have to reinvent and redefine words to make your argument hold water, you probably have a weak argument.

John Larsen [01:59:52] What a great summary. We should have just listened to this. We could have saved two hours. John?

John Dehlin [01:59:57] What? Did I miss any big ones? Did I miss any big ones?

John Larsen [01:59:59] No, I think that's a good sum up. We did a couple other corner cases, but. But, yeah, I. I think thinking is hard. This stuff is hard. It takes work. That's why most of us don't want to do it.

John Dehlin [02:00:11] Yeah, it's not very fun.

Carah Burrell [02:00:12] Yeah. I think also, obviously, ideas in our brain, if they're serving us, then your brain will find reasons to keep upholding them. I did that for 30 years. And so until you have to pick a side where suddenly those ideas of Mormonism are hurting me, my family, the people that love me. When people say you looked for reasons to leave the church, it was like I saw that it wasn't serving me the way that it used to. And it just so happens that I started to notice the logical fallacies more obviously than I did before. And so when people say, you know, Maybe that's a fallacy in of itself that you're looking for reasons I was like, I was just more hyper aware to the fallacies is pretty much what losing my faith in Mormonism came down to.

John Larsen [02:00:52] Well, it's, it's. We've talked about it before. It's a house of cards. Which is why people talk about an epiphany moment when it starts to fall apart. Because you have all these assumptions you have to keep in your head. And once you question those key assumptions, as the great Tal Bachmann once said is, all you have to do is allow yourself to question that it may not be true. And for most people, that's enough.

John Dehlin [02:01:15] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [02:01:16] Right on.

John Dehlin [02:01:17] Beautiful. Well, John, it's so great to have you back in the saddle. We're glad that we didn't lose you and your appearances on Mormon Stories podcast just from your move. We're really grateful again to Gerardo for helping us get you set up and we apologize to our livestream viewers that we had those technical glitches at the beginning. We'll keep refining our process and we'll, we'll add to our checklist some things to make sure that we, we try to not repeat any of these errors. But having said that and having said that, we promised you guys, you, all that we would have some call in. It's kind of late and we, we don't. We care. Needs to get to bed and so.

John Larsen [02:02:04] And I maybe propose a planned call in show where people can write. The people who don't want to be on the phone can write questions or whatever.

John Dehlin [02:02:13] Yeah, yeah. We need to figure out that mailbag.

Carah Burrell [02:02:15] Like a mailbag segment.

John Larsen [02:02:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:02:17] And sometimes we can set up like a voicemail where actually people can leave voiceover voice mail or, or video mail. And then we can actually play their, their audio or their, their video clips.

John Larsen [02:02:28] Hey, we did a call in show together in 2010. Do you remember that? That was 12 years ago.

John Dehlin [02:02:33] I do. We've come a long way, baby.

Carah Burrell [02:02:35] I was 14 years old.

John Dehlin [02:02:37] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [02:02:38] Just kidding.

John Dehlin [02:02:39] No, you're not.

John Larsen [02:02:39] Oh, well. Yeah, we'll get the bugs worked out. Thanks everybody for their patience. I've got a lot of my books unpack. I'm excited to, to dive into some weird corner, some Mormonism again.

John Dehlin [02:02:50] Excellent. Yeah. Well, thanks, John. It's great to have you. Thanks. You're always a treat and you're well loved in our community, so it's an honor to have you here. I'll also just remind our audience that we have set up a fund to pay for John Larsen. And so if you value. We pay John Larsen $1,000 an episode, just like we do Simon Southerton out of respect for their expertise and their knowledge. And we need your donations to support that. So if you have donated to the Mormon Expression John Larsen Fund, great. If you haven't, Please go to mormonstories.org mormonexpression There's a donate button there. We'll include that in the show notes and maybe Carah or Jen will include that now in the comments. But if you, if you become a monthly donor to the Mormon Expression Fund, not only will that fund John Larsen coming regularly, it'll fund his equipment and maybe his broadband if we need to increase that. It also funds us being able to maintain the Mormon Expression Podcast library, which we have worked with John to help put up now on, on the Internet. So for those of you who don't know, John Larsen did this amazing multi year Mormon themed podcast that literally has some of the best Mormon themed discussions ever. Whether it's Word of Wisdom, DNC132Navo Expositor, or how to build a transoceanic vessel. If you want some amazing Mormon themed content, check out the Mormon Expression podcast and we will also include a link to that in our show notes that Jen and or Carah are adding to. So, so please become a monthly donor to, to John Larsen and to the Mormon Expression Initiative and we'll get many, many more months of John Larsen goodness. Is there anything you want to add to that, John?

John Larsen [02:04:47] No. The, the world costs money and that's for most of us. It's the only thing we have to influence things around. So you need to decide where your money's going to go and what kind of things you want to support. This sort of st. Takes a lot of time, takes a lot of energy, and if you want quality, then you need to, you need to pay something. I don't know what. To me, it's sort of obvious. There's this weird ex Mormon thing where for some reason they don't want people to get paid for their work that they want to consume. It's, it's, it's, it's tragic really. There's a, there's more than enough to go around and everyone gets a crown, you know?

John Dehlin [02:05:32] Yeah. I love it. Well, thank you, John. And we love having you step off of my gown. I love it. All right. All right, brother. We'll have you back soon for more. Thank you so much. Thanks to everyone who tuned in today. Thanks to Gerardo and Carah. Thanks to you for, for being my partner in this righteous endeavor.

Carah Burrell [02:05:56] Right on.

John Dehlin [02:05:56] Fist bump.

John Larsen [02:05:58] All right. Love you guys. Love you guys out there in the world.

John Dehlin [02:06:01] All right.

John Larsen [02:06:03] All right.

John Dehlin [02:06:03] Thanks, Sean. You're awesome. Thanks, Carah. And thanks to everyone for joining us today on Mormon Stories podcast. We appreciate your patience as we work out the kinks, but we're grateful to be able to do this job. So please continue to support us when you can. Share the good word with everyone you can. If you have ideas about how to make our episodes better, comment on YouTube, comment on Facebook, comment on our blog or send us an email@mormonstoriesgmail.com will forward emails on to John Larsen or wherever they need to go. And again, we just thank everyone for supporting what we do and be good to each other, be kind to each other and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

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