Welcome Back and Episode Introduction

John Dehlin [00:00:01] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is July 9, 2021 and we are thrilled to have back in our studio today the original John, the John Larsen, host of Mormon Expression podcast, legend and all around good guy John Larsen.

John Larsen [00:00:23] Welcome back, John. It's always a pleasure to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:26] For those who don't know, there was a time when Mormon Stories podcast had retired for the third time and I was trying to get into a PhD program in Utah and I had to apply to BYU. So I shut down Mormon Stories Podcast to apply to byu. And during that time there was such a vacuum. John Larsen stepped in with his band of friends and started this amazing podcast called Mormon Expression that to this day is legendary especially. Well, too many episodes to mention, but. But of course, the how to Build a Transoceanic Vessel episode is consistently listed as the most important podcast episode ever made in the Mormon realm, including the Michael Koh and the Tom Phillips and the Christine Jepsen Clark interviews.

John Dehlin [00:01:13] So we have a legend with us in studio. We were so thrilled to have John Larsen back during COVID where. What do we talk about? What do we talk about, John? Catching up with John Larsen, right?

John Larsen [00:01:24] Oh, yeah. We talked about all sorts of stuff. We talked about. We talked about QAnon and we talked about sex. You always ask me about sex, John.

John Dehlin [00:01:31] I try to live vicariously.

John Larsen [00:01:33] So what I'm hearing is you were kind of like Friends and then Friends retired and I was the Joey Show. Is that, Is that what you just.

John Dehlin [00:01:41] I just watched the Friends reunion. By the way, did you see the Friends reunion?

John Larsen [00:01:44] I actually never really watched Friends, so the reunion didn't really spark me very much.

Carah Burrell [00:01:48] But the 32 year old woman in the room sure did.

John Larsen [00:01:51] Wait, who are you?

Carah Burrell [00:01:52] Hi, I'm Carah Burrell. I go by Nuance. Sometimes I'm be chiming in because I am extremely excited for this episode.

John Dehlin [00:02:00] Yeah. So when, when John came back, I basically said, john carte blanche, anytime you want to appear on Mormon Stories, you're welcome and you pick the topics. So that's what we're going to be doing today. I'm going to just call it, this is going to be a PG13 rating. Well, depending on how you think about it. Because two F bombs gets you in our rating in the Motion Picture Association. So depending on how bad you guys let loose, I'm just warning you now, if you are looking for sort of soft, friendly, no profanity Mormon Stories podcast, that might not be your experience today. So Turn it off.

John Larsen [00:02:36] Now.

John Dehlin [00:02:37] We're going to be irreverent and fun and not restrained and just have a good time. And of course, Carah is down for that.

Carah Burrell [00:02:45] Yeah, I'm always.

John Larsen [00:02:47] I would say thank you, John. I'll try to watch my potty mouth, but there is some R rated stuff in here, but it all comes from prophet seers and revelators, so I'll just use that as a. As a. As a tease. Yeah, there's stuff you can't say today.

John Dehlin [00:03:02] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [00:03:02] Follow the prophet.

John Dehlin [00:03:04] Okay, so John's gonna introduce the topic. I'm just gonna say again, thanks to everyone who has helped me make Mormon Stories Podcast thriving this past couple years. And it's just so great to have Carah here who can help with the audio and video, the production, the time codes, and to provide wit and wisdom and humor and female perspective and comedy. We're just grateful to all the support that allows Care to be here. So, Carah, it's great to have you.

Carah Burrell [00:03:32] Oh, yeah, thanks, John.

John Dehlin [00:03:33] All right, John, so what are we in it? What are we. What are we in? A treat for today.

John Larsen [00:03:37] Like, like you said, we always go back and forth kind of. You know, I'll pop an idea every once in a while and you'll, you'll, you'll ask me about this one. Matter of fact, I turned you down. There was a podcast you asked me to come on. I said, I don't. I'm not smart enough. I don't know enough about that to do it. But so I. The other day, I had the inspiration. Back in the old Mormon expression days, we used to do these top 10 lists because it was a good way. It's a good rhetorical format to get about an hour of content. And so I sent you a top 10 list. Right. So this week I was researching said list, you know, to make sure I didn't sound too stupid. And I never got past item number one.

John Dehlin [00:04:13] Yeah, when I saw the list, I thought, wow, each one of these could probably be its own episode. Right? So.

John Larsen [00:04:18] So we're starting at the first. So the, the list I gave you was my favorite, weird or strange beliefs in Mormonism. Right. And so, so, so that was the list. So I started number one, and that's as far as I got. So should we just jump in?

Setting the Stage for Today's Topics

John Dehlin [00:04:36] Jump in.

John Larsen [00:04:37] All right.

John Dehlin [00:04:38] So we're just here for the ride.

John Larsen [00:04:39] Well, I think there's a little bit of background we need to. We need to level set whenever we're talking about Mormonism because there's certain things that kind of get Glossed over. First of all, the great Jacob Marley. You remember Jacob Marley?

John Dehlin [00:04:51] Now, are we talking about the guy with the pumpkin and the guy with the chains?

John Larsen [00:04:55] The ghost.

John Dehlin [00:04:55] Oh, the ghost of Scrooge.

John Larsen [00:04:57] Yeah, Scrooge's business partner. He said something great. He said, I wear the chains I forged in life. I made it link by link and yard by yard. I guarded it on my own free will, and by my own free will, I wore it. Jacob forged the chains that he's carrying around right now.

John Dehlin [00:05:18] He was one of the three ghosts, right?

John Larsen [00:05:20] He was. He introduced the three ghosts.

John Dehlin [00:05:22] Okay?

John Larsen [00:05:22] He was the partner. He. They were. Scrooge and Marley were crooks.

John Dehlin [00:05:26] All right, I'm rusty.

John Larsen [00:05:27] And they had. They had spent their. Their lives bilking the poor and making lots of money. And he was. He had forged his chains for his post mortal existence that he was forced to wear. There's a great book out there. And. And I know this strikes in Mormonism. William Goldman wrote the book the Princess Bride. Of course, everybody in whoever went to Mutual. Do they still call it Mutual Young Men's Young Women?

John Dehlin [00:05:57] Probably not.

John Larsen [00:05:57] Well, every. They all saw the Princess Bride. It was really popular in Mormon dom in the 80s.

John Dehlin [00:06:02] Yeah, it's a legendary.

John Larsen [00:06:03] It is a fantastic novel. And in the novel, he remembers that his dad would read him this book, the Princess Bride by S. Morgan Stern. And so the book is about him getting this book that his dad read to him over and over again when he was a young man. So he finally, as an adult, goes and acquires a copy of the book and he starts to read it.

John Larsen [00:06:28] And of course, it's an older book, so it reads like the Bible. It's got genealogies and stuff in it. But as he starts reading the book, he recognizes that his father was editing the book while he was telling him the stories of the Princess Bride, that he cut portions of the book out that didn't fit his father's narrative. Now, what's funny about the movie is the movie is purely his father's narrative. So it's an old enough book. Now I can give spoilers, right? Spoiler alert. If you don't want to know what happens in the book. The Princess Bride. Tune out for the next 20 minutes.

John Larsen [00:06:59] Okay, so he's reading the book, and of course, in the end, you know, they vanquish the tyrannical prince, they rescue the bride, and they're riding off into the sunset, and that's where the movie ends. But as he's reading the book, the book still has more chapters.

John Larsen [00:07:14] So he reads the next chapter, and I think one of them was wounded. Well, two of them were wounded. And as they're riding away, the man in black slumps over into his horse. He passes out from his stab wound. And then the Guildenstern guards are coming up behind them. They're charging them. They can hear them, and they're riding off and they're not in good shape. And that's where the book actually ends.

John Larsen [00:07:41] And so the book, the novel is about him dealing with this, confronting his youth, these teachings of his youth that were so monumental, so moving. But when he really actually read the book, the book didn't say what he had been told, that it said

John Dehlin [00:08:00] catching them.

John Larsen [00:08:01] Okay, so let's talk about there. There. There's a sign that you see when you're driving around. It has two Rs on it, R, R. And it has a cross on it. It's yellow and it's circular. You'll need this for your driver's test. What that means is if you're not careful, you can get run over by a damned old train. Right.

John Larsen [00:08:17] And I'm going to tell you what those R and R stand for. They stand for revelation and restoration. So if you're not careful with Mormonism, you'll get run over by the train of revelation and restoration. Mormonism differentiated itself from all the other Protestant religions that were getting going in the Americas in the early 19th century by claiming that this was a restoration of the one true order. We're going to come. We're going to come back, that this was Joseph Smith's defining point. He wasn't making anything up. He was restoring an ancient order. And that comes through revelation. Okay, so, so by, by restoration, through revelation, we were able to restore the original church the way it's always been, that, that these models are very ancient.

John Larsen [00:09:07] And as we go through and we talk about the, what Joseph Smith wrote and the Scriptures, he wrote this. This is a very key point. But I want to lay that out very, very early. I also want to lay out. I've got a lot of disclaimers here. Let's look. Simple algebra. Any number plus zero is the same number.

John Larsen [00:09:26] So if I robbed a bank in 1982, then I robbed a bank in 1990. But those are only two days of my life. The other 30,000 days, I did nothing. I'm still a bank robber. The only way I could not be a bank robber is I could be reformed bank robber. I could give back. I could apologize. I could say I was wrong to take this $10,000 from the bank.

John Larsen [00:09:49] I don't get any credit whatsoever for not being a bank robber between the times I'm a bank robbery. Okay? So if the church wants to repudiate any teachings, it cannot repudiate them through silence. So if a prophet, seer or revelator taught something and then no other prophet, seer, revelator contradicts it or replaces it with a new teaching, it stands.

John Larsen [00:10:16] And I would say the teaching still stands even if you say I repudiate it, but you actually don't repudiate it. You would have to actually explain it and explain how it's repudiated. So. So there's a lot of teachings, and we're gonna. We're gonna actually be reading some of the things that the prophet seers and revelators have written either by revelation or directly. And none of these things have been repudiated. So I would say that they are still all teachings of the church because they have not been encountered. Okay, all right, one other little thing. Let's talk about the. The historians of the church.

Key Mormon Texts and Historians

John Larsen [00:10:48] The first real kind of big systematic historian was B.H. roberts. And he worked primarily in the late 19th century and he compiled the first history of the church. That first seven volume history of the church. That book's been rewritten several, several times that was handed off. BH Roberts got messed up with alcohol and kind of fell off the wagon. I think he spent the last part of his life, or he died in rehab in California.

John Dehlin [00:11:13] I did not know that he.

John Larsen [00:11:15] Yeah. And he, as you probably covered in the podcast, he struggled with some. The facts of Mormonism. He also buried a lot of stuff and covered a lot of stuff up that was handed off to Joseph F. Smith. Joseph F. Smith was the son of Hiram Smith, came over with Mary Fielding on the plains. And he, he was sort of the connection to the Smith family. He was, of course, put in the quorum of the 12. And he became the early church historian, Joseph F. Smith. And he actually wrote the first version of the book, Mormon Doctrine. I think it was published in 1903.

John Larsen [00:11:45] He had a son, Joseph Fielding Smith, who also was a prophet, seer and revelator. And he wrote, he was very, very active in writing about doctrine and clearing what doctrine was most famously wrote man, his origin and destiny, which is a complete takedown, accurate takedown from Mormon perspective of the theory of evolution, and explains in great detail this volume why Mormons can't believe in evolution. He's exactly right.

John Larsen [00:12:10] And he wrote answers to Gospel questions. He wrote a column. So he Became kind of the defining voice. He had a daughter named Amelia, married into the McConkie clan. The McConkeys, of course, are still known for controlling the legal arm of the church. Curtin McConkie is the law firm that has a tunnel from it across the street to the temple.

John Larsen [00:12:31] So Bruce R. McConkie, who married Amelia, was Joseph Fielding Smith's son in law. And he inherited a lot of Joseph Fielding Smith's work. And then he wrote the best selling, longest selling, most published book of all time in Mormon, Mormonism, which is Mormon doctrine, you know, naming after his grandfather in law's book.

John Larsen [00:12:52] And that became the definitive. The definitive book for a lot of years until I would say it was retired. The church sent it down the memory hole in the late 2000s.

John Dehlin [00:13:04] Yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [00:13:05] He published two versions. He published one in 1966, which is this one I'm holding right here. There were 3,000 of them printed, and I happen to have one. And then he. Then he republished it in 68, where he took out some of the more problematic doctrines. However, they didn't really repudiate the things that he took out. He is also. Most historians believe that he is the one who wrote both the topical guide and the Bible dictionary that was under his committee. It's his writing style. It's his forceful style. So for about 90 years, Mormon doctrine was driven by this one family, by the Smiths, Joseph F.

John Larsen [00:13:42] Joseph Fielding and Bruce R. And it's hard now because the church kind of wants to. But that book, Mormon Doctrine, defined Mormon theology. It. You can find it quoted all the time. You can find it quoted in talks, in the ends. And it was probably. It. Probably. I have a memory. It's the most quoted single source other than the Scriptures. So it's a very important source. So we want to talk about our sources here.

John Dehlin [00:14:08] All right, I'm just going to say Doctrines of Salvation, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 by Joseph Fielding Smith. Super formative for me on my mission. They shaped so much of my own, of my expectations of prophets and revelation in the Mormon Church.

John Larsen [00:14:22] Yeah, Joseph Fielding really took over from Joseph F. And Joseph F. He's really tough to deal with because the historians talk about how. How he really. He burned a lot of stuff. He got rid of a lot of material that was unsavory to the church, locked things up. And then Fielding sort of took. Took the. Joseph Fielding Smith took the baton and really defined out what Mormonism, modern Mormonism, which Basically, since about 2005, I would say they've been slowly dismantling the, the Mormonism was defined by the Smiths.

John Dehlin [00:14:57] I kind of feel like Joseph F. Smith and Joseph Fielding Smith kind of ruined the church a little bit. Now that may sound like a weird thing to say, but.

John Larsen [00:15:03] Well, the only reason I'd say it's weird is because I don't know what the church would be without them. I mean, they were, they were, they were pinnacle pillars of what defined the church. You know, what would it be without them? I don't know. Like a

John Dehlin [00:15:15] club. Well, there's just, there's this time period with Woodstow and Talmadge and Eyring and Roberts where you just sort of see scientists having an influence and rational thought having a hope in a prayer.

John Larsen [00:15:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:27] And it's like Joseph Felix Smith outlived those dudes.

John Larsen [00:15:30] I would have. George Q. Yeah, there's, there's a, there's another, there's another thread. Probably starts with Wilford Woodruff, then George Q. Cannon and Wid. So, you know, he, he was writing articles and, and Widow was not afraid of science and, and, and that. But, but after McKay. McKay solidified up the right wing, especially when they put Benson, Ezra Tough Benson in, who was in the 50s, Secretary of Agriculture in the 60s. He was a wingnut.

John Larsen [00:15:59] And we'll get there a little bit more. But some of these threads that are still plaguing the church that we're going to talk about run very, very deep and very well endorsed. So I would say there's a holy trifecta of establishing something as doctrine. If it's said by a prophet, seer and revelator one, if it's said by a prophet, seer and revelator at Conference 2, if the church then publishes the words that were said by a prophet, seer and revelator at Conference 3, I would say it is doctrine. And everything we're going to be talking about here for the next little while is doctrine.

John Dehlin [00:16:32] The only thing I would add is there's occasional, a first presidency statement where the whole first presidency signs something. Sometimes they used to do that. I don't think they do that.

John Larsen [00:16:40] Yeah, yeah. The proclamation, I guess that would be. Yeah, yeah. We would say that's established doctrine.

John Dehlin [00:16:46] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:16:46] Now, I mean, the Mormons created. I said Revelation, you know, when they, when they, when they, they really push their own authority, these prophet seers and revelators. And it is very much a problem because you read the Book of Mormon, there's what, 13 prophets or 15 prophets in there and every word they, they say in the Book of Mormon assumed to be Absolutely true. It is an unquestionable doctrine that you can't question anything in the Book of Mormon.

John Larsen [00:17:09] And. But there is so much. These guys are so prolific. And I have. I still have a big library because I. When I research, I don't. I tend to research off of original sources. And it's a monument to the memory hole. The memory hole exists in my. In my house.

John Larsen [00:17:25] So, so that you. The journal of Discourse and all stuff, they. They often are very, very clear. Like, if you go and search, like, racist statements by LDS prophets, you'll be reading for weeks like that. Like, they. They are very prolific and. And it's a real problem for the church, which is why they don't translate very much into other languages. Why they're very. They're very careful on what they let Mormons read. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:17:50] Any questions, Carah?

Carah Burrell [00:17:52] Oh, man. Just the. How do I get. How do I get a memory hole in my house? That's what I want, is a collection. Do you have any?

John Dehlin [00:17:58] I've been to John. He's got a fun library.

Carah Burrell [00:18:00] That's all I want.

John Dehlin [00:18:01] I just want to say I've already learned, like, 10 things I didn't know in just, like, 10 minutes with John Larsen. I've learned 10 things I didn't know, at least, if not 20.

John Larsen [00:18:08] I'm sure they're all just things you've forgotten. All right, so we teased it. I gave the list of the weird doctrines. So I just started at the beginning of time, and I started with Cain. So what we are going to do is we are going to trace the doctrine of Cain and what's behind Cain, this fella from the beginning of. Of time, of this moral existence until now. And that's what we're gonna do for the next little while. You ready?

The Doctrine of Cain in Scripture

John Dehlin [00:18:35] The Doctrine of Cain.

John Larsen [00:18:36] Strap your. Strap yourselves in. We're gonna talk about Kane. Now, now, now, let's. Let's. Let's go through this. By the way, I would recommend to anybody the series Lucifer was on, like, CBS or something. I think Netflix picked it up.

John Dehlin [00:18:50] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hot guy, right? Some.

John Larsen [00:18:53] Yeah, yeah. He's kind of dreamy. I'd switch teams for him. Right? Yeah, yeah. But. But in the show Lucifer, the. The devil gets tired of being stuck in hell, so he goes to LA and opens a nightclub. And then. And then, you know, there's all these crime CSI shows. So in the first episode, they have to solve a murder, and the devil gets really interested in solving crime. So for the next five seasons, you follow the LAPD with the Devil solving crime.

John Dehlin [00:19:21] Do you recommend the show?

John Larsen [00:19:22] I would highly recommend. Oh wow. Because it, it really speaks to the absurdity of the, the, the belief in the devil. But it's a very tongue in cheek. Eve shows up, Mother in heaven shows up, God shows up, you get to deal with all the celestial beings. Yeah, it's irreverent, but, but you know, what else would you expect? Okay, so Adam and God, Adam, Jehovah and God and all the rest build this earth. This is Mormon Doctrine 101. They build, they build this earth patterned after the worlds where we used to live, which is patterned after the worlds where they used to live. So this eternal cycle, building worlds and building a plan, a plan of salvation.

John Larsen [00:20:01] This plan that, that was introduced that includes all this stuff we're about to talk about for some strange reason. And Adam and Eve, Adam who's one of the co creators of the earth brings Eve either one of his wives or his wife down with him to live in the Garden of Eden and they get thrown out of the Garden of Eden.

John Larsen [00:20:23] This is, you know, old hat. Everybody, everybody knows this story. There's the Mormon reasons and the Christian sort of reason. We won't get into that. But Eve has two children, Cain and Abel. And Abel is a sheep herder, he raises sheep. And Cain is a vegetable farmer and he raises vegetables. Now in the Bible itself, Mormons sometimes have a disadvantage because the Joseph Smith rewrote the Bible in some aspects and Mormons aren't always clear as to what's in the Bible and what's not in the Bible. So we're going to talk a little bit about that.

John Larsen [00:20:59] So Cain chooses to make an offering to God of the fruits of his, literally the fruit fruits of his labor. Right. And Abel makes a offering of a lamb, the firstling of the flock. And God is not happy with Cain's offering. And in the Bible it's not exactly clear why God is God. God is the God of the Old Testament.

John Dehlin [00:21:29] Later he's super jazzed about firstborn sacrifices.

John Larsen [00:21:32] Well, he likes blood, right? So Cain is the one who's not offering blood. So yeah, God is always jazzed about bloody sacrifices. Right? But in the Bible it doesn't say exactly why God is not happy with Cain's offering, but Joseph Smith gave us clarity actually. So Joseph Smith said this, the power, glory and blessing of the priesthood could not continue with those who received ordination only as their righteousness continued. For Cain also being authorized to offer sacrifice, but not offering it in righteousness was cursed. It signifies then that the ordinances must be kept in the very way God had appointed. Otherwise the priesthood would prove a cursing instead of a blessing.

John Larsen [00:22:15] So Joseph Smith here is asserting that Cain had the priesthood and the right to perform said ritual, but by changing the nature of the offering. The offering was supposed to be blood in similitude of. Now this is. See, I'm not a Christian, so this is where I get things mixed up. Because God wanted them to kill baby animals to signify that God would kill his son.

John Larsen [00:22:41] But when you die, you don't actually die. So God wanted us to kill baby animals in similitude of a sacrifice that actually never happens because Jesus never goes anywhere. Right, Right.

John Dehlin [00:22:59] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [00:22:59] He just gave up his weekend.

John Larsen [00:23:00] Right? Yeah. He had a bad weekend for our sins. So. So, so, yeah, so. So what. What Joseph Smith is saying is that Cain perverted the ritual. That which. Which was the ritual that was set up from the beginning of time. Joseph Smith is very clear about this over and over and over again that you cannot mess with these rituals because

John Dehlin [00:23:21] the doctrine can't change God.

John Larsen [00:23:22] The doctrine change, can't change. The rituals are absolutely fixed. They are restored. They're a restoration of the plan of salvation that was put in place before even Adam was on the earth. So according to Joseph Smith, Cain's sin was changing a sacred ritual. Let that for a minute.

John Dehlin [00:23:43] Okay, that'd be bad.

John Larsen [00:23:47] So more. The, the. The. The. The issue is that Mormons tend to. People who wrote after Joseph Smith tend to ascribe other reasons to, to. To that. That Cain was perverting these sort of things. Now, it needs to be clear. Satan does not appear in the Old Testament, not until the Book of Job.

John Dehlin [00:24:05] I don't think Jews believe in Satan.

Satan, Cain, and the Book of Moses

John Larsen [00:24:07] No, no. So the, it's. Satan is not a character that exists in the Torah.

Carah Burrell [00:24:12] It's okay, because God does most of the the.

John Larsen [00:24:14] And God created him anyway.

Carah Burrell [00:24:17] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:24:17] You know, the Old Testament doesn't need Satan.

John Larsen [00:24:19] Like, like, if you're God, you're an evil. If, like cartoon character and you have a minion, you still have culpability for whatever the minion does. Right. God created the devil.

John Dehlin [00:24:29] Yeah, but in the Old Testament, God is the devil. I mean, let's just be clear.

John Larsen [00:24:33] Well, okay, you said it, not me. That's John. I'm not class me like that. No, sir, I will. Okay. All right. But in, in, in Moses. Now let's talk a little bit about the Book of Moses. So Joseph Smith has basically four books of scripture. One, the Book of Mormon, where he gets those plates with much Ado. Right. And then he either uses the plates or puts a rock in his hat or carries them around or whatever. He uses the plates as some sort of conduit. We really need farms here. Or fair. Those guys.

John Dehlin [00:25:10] The plates are in the forest, dude. The plates are in the forest.

John Larsen [00:25:12] So. So he uses the plates somehow or the other to get the Book of Mormon. And as far as it is translated correctly, it is the most correct book ever. Well, it was because I wrote a book 10 years ago that had one page in it that said, this book says that the Book of Mormon is the most correct book that has ever been written. So I contend that logically, my book is therefore the most correct book that has ever been written, because the only thing it points out is that the other book is the most correct book that's ever been written and no one

John Dehlin [00:25:40] needed to end it.

John Larsen [00:25:41] So the Book of Mormon is potentially the second most correct book.

Carah Burrell [00:25:44] Check me out.

John Larsen [00:25:45] Signed copies are available in the lobby.

John Dehlin [00:25:47] You just dethrone the Book of Mormon.

John Larsen [00:25:49] Okay, so. So the Book of Abraham. We. We know. So he translates that. And then these mummies show up in town. You know, like one of those guys who's selling, like, snake oil and patent medicine rolls into. Rolls into Kurland. John, this is serious stuff. Like, people. Millions of people.

John Dehlin [00:26:07] I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

John Larsen [00:26:08] All right, so I don't mean to laugh. No, no. But Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith himself was a funny guy. Like, that's what people say. He. He was full of charm and humor.

Carah Burrell [00:26:17] So I'm sure he was like, where are your wives? I only see one. Oh, Joe.

John Dehlin [00:26:20] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:26:21] So these mummies come in, and they buy him, and he sets up his mom, you know, in the hotel to kind of do a mummy show. You could pay a nickel and go down, see the mummies. But the Egyptians would bury mummies with prayer scrolls, right?

John Larsen [00:26:37] And one of them is a big round thing that sits underneath their head and that has anubis and things like that. Then there's these prayer scrolls that, you know. Like, I don't see that. It's very different than, you know, like, burying your mom with her favorite poem, the footprints or whatever. You know, you put them in there. And so according to some Mormon apologists, that scroll, which is all Egyptian funeral text, there was actually another section that was sewn on. This is papyrus that was written by his own hand, by Abraham's own hand. So these mummies that come rolling into the suburbs of Cincinnati. No, Cleveland.

John Larsen [00:27:16] He's outside of Cleveland. I'm sorry. These Mummies that come rolling through Cleveland happen to have the writings of Abraham and what he taught to the Pharaoh. So that's where we got Joseph Smith's second set of scriptures. The third set of scripture that we got from Joseph Smith is the Book of Moses. It's also in the pro. Great price now, this one, by this time, Joseph Smith, it's gloves off. He's directed that straight from heaven.

John Dehlin [00:27:41] Doesn't need. It doesn't need a prophetess.

John Larsen [00:27:42] He doesn't need anything at this point. So I would contend that the Book of Moses from a Mormon perspective would be the most accurate scripture that we have because there is nothing save Joseph Smith in the way between God and the print on our page. So, yeah, if you question the Book of Moses, you are questioning the man Joseph himself, because you can't blame it on Moroni. You know, you can say, well, Moroni was kind of a bigot. He didn't like Lamanites. And, and we're, we're kind of ashamed of it a little bit. But Moroni was a product of his. Of his Mayan times.

Carah Burrell [00:28:15] And, you know, we never talk about that. Moroni was a product of his time.

John Dehlin [00:28:19] No, no, no. That is legitimate 21st century Mormon apologetic.

Carah Burrell [00:28:23] Really? I had no idea.

John Dehlin [00:28:23] Justification for Book of Mormon racism. They're now saying that there were. There were Book of Mormon prophets that were racist and that's why there's racism in the Book of Mormon.

John Larsen [00:28:31] So I want to just rewind the last third 20 seconds. Who just happened. You called me out because I was saying something so outrageous that you couldn't believe it. And John had to correct you and say, no, no, this is really what apologists say. All right, so we're still. We're still on. So Book of Book of Moses. Right. And then of course, there's the Doctrine and Covenants, which was the fourth book of Scripture which Joseph Smith dictated directly or however he got.

John Dehlin [00:28:53] And King James Version, I guess you

John Larsen [00:28:54] could say King James Version is kind of screwball. I didn't really go into it. I would say King James Version is kind of. It should really be part of the Book of Moses. Moses, because the first part of the Book of Moses is just a rewrite of Genesis.

John Larsen [00:29:06] Okay, so Cain in the Bible, it says that God put a mark upon him. And it doesn't say anything at all about what that mark is. In the Middle Ages, in Christianity, in the Christian Middle Ages, a teaching started to arise or a belief that the Cain had a mark. And that was eventually passed on to ham through The Canaanites, we'll get there a little bit more. But it became a medieval Christian teaching that people from Africa, black people from Africa, were descendants of Cain and that the mark in the Bible that was put on Cain was a mark of black skin. That is not in the Bible, but it was a very common belief.

John Larsen [00:29:55] And like, say it surfaced in the Middle Ages and it took hold in 17th, 18th, 19th century America because we were a country based on slavery. At least part of our economy, the southern economy, was based on slavery. And of course, when you're enslaving other human beings, you have to kind of justify that because I would think there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance about that. I would hope.

John Larsen [00:30:22] Even though it's been a really common practice. You know, the Romans, they just enslaved everybody. A slave is a slave. They didn't care. But, but it became a more and more of a, of a, of a, of a racist thing by the 19th century. And so, so this belief of, that we're going to be talking about, that the black people were somehow cursed is not something that Joseph Smith made up. It was a common belief in his time, but Joseph Smith did a big disservice to apologists today.

John Larsen [00:30:51] He rewrote the Bible in the book of Moses and he inserted this stuff into the Bible. So where most Christians can disavow and say, this is just our racist history, we run into our first big problem, that Joseph Smith did not translate that many ancient records.

John Larsen [00:31:09] And he is the man, the prophet, seer and revelator. So we have to take serious whatever he bothered to spend his time on. And one of the things he bothered to spend his time on was rewriting the book of Genesis and giving it voice as if it was directed straight from Moses. So that Moses wrote this directly and Joseph Smith was just channeling from the ancient ascents. Okay, so the intrepid Bruce R. Gave us a little bit more clarity here. He said, as a result of his rebellion, Cain was cursed with a dark skin.

John Larsen [00:31:41] He became the father of the Negroes, and those spirits who were not worthy to receive the priesthood are born through his lineage image. That was a prophet, seer and revelator, Bruce R. McConkey, who said that.

John Dehlin [00:31:51] Oh my gosh, there's so much there.

John Larsen [00:31:53] Okay, so there's, there's this thing called master. I always say Master Mahan because I'm, I'm always.

John Dehlin [00:32:00] That's probably right.

John Larsen [00:32:01] Well, who knows? It doesn't exist in the Bible. Right. This is all from Joseph Smith. So in In Joseph Smith's telling of, of the Kane Nable story, Cain says, well, I am Mahan, and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And then one of his sons.

John Larsen [00:32:20] Let's read from the book, shall we? Moses 5, 49. For Lamech, having entered into a covenant with Satan after the manner of Cain, wherein he became Master Mahan, master of the great secret which was administrated unto Cain by Satan and Irad, the son of Enoch, having known the secret, began to reveal it unto the sons of Adam. Wherefore Lamech, being angry, slew him, not unlike Cain, his brother Abel, for the sake of getting gain, but he slew him from the oath's sake.

John Larsen [00:32:51] For from the days of Cain there was a secret combination, and their works were in the dark and they knew every man his brother. That is from the book of Moses, ostensibly written by Moses, as revealed by Joseph Smith. So we kind of skipped over that. Cain slew Abel, and in the book of Moses, it's at the bequest of Satan. Satan tells him to do it.

John Larsen [00:33:11] So. So then God curses Cain and he says he'll put a mark upon him so that no man will kill him, which is kind of weird. And we'll get to. We'll get to what that might mean here in a little bit.

Master Mahan and the Covenant with Cain

Carah Burrell [00:33:26] Do you guys know the joke about Cain?

John Larsen [00:33:28] No, what's the joke about Cain?

Carah Burrell [00:33:30] How long did Cain hate his brother?

John Larsen [00:33:33] How long?

Carah Burrell [00:33:33] As long as he was able.

John Larsen [00:33:38] Okay, so Cain kills Abel and he becomes Master Mahan. And the Satan whispers this grand secret to him. And then Lemmick does it. And then Limbic says, well, if Satan was cursed seven times, I'll be cursed 70 times. Something like that. But. But Lemmick wasn't cursed to live forever as Cain was, that he will walk to and fro on this earth, never knowing resolution that no one will be able to kill him.

John Larsen [00:34:03] So. So through modern revelation, we've determined that the mark is to be black, specifically African black. And we have learned that. That he's still around. We're gonna come back to him in a minute. He's gonna resurface in the story.

John Larsen [00:34:15] Okay, so Master. The Master Mahan is described as kind of this office, the chief priest of the secret combination that was introduced in the beginning. And we see this show up very much in the Book of Mormon. We'll go, we'll get there in a little bit. But this is why in Mormonism, Adam and the others had to go start preaching the gospel. Because Satan from the get go, perverted everything and started leading people astray and in Mormon teaching, oftentimes, this. This why Noah was saved. No one, his family and the rest of the world was destroyed. That the Master Mahan, who was the grand schemer along with Lucifer, had so corrupted the world that God needed to destroy it all.

John Larsen [00:35:03] Except God being the wily little guy he is. Even though he's going to destroy every man, woman, child, bug, geological feature, topsoil. He's going to put salt water on everything. You know, if you tell. To the top of the. The. If you were right, a boat up to the top of the. The water to cover the mountains, you wouldn't be able to breathe oxygen. I never really figured out how that one worked.

John Larsen [00:35:32] It would be really cold up there. So he's going to destroy everything, but he decides to preserve the curse in the land. Because we have to remember that one of the key elements of Mormonism is there is a plan of salvation. All of this stuff is happening according to plan. Why did Cain murder Abel and introduce Master Mahan, the great thing that Satan was sent down to do, and pervert all of humankind? Because God wanted it that way. All right, so let's get to Ham.

John Dehlin [00:36:00] Okay.

John Larsen [00:36:00] Everybody loves ham. So Noah has three sons now. You guys are all Mormons. Everybody in this room was. Was raised in the church. I mean, I might be telling to you in a more entertaining manner, but I. Have I said anything that anybody hasn't heard in Sunday school?

Carah Burrell [00:36:15] Nope.

John Larsen [00:36:16] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:36:16] No. No. And I'm just. I'm trying to think this through. So I know you're probably going to talk about this legend that Cain is still around later, right?

John Larsen [00:36:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:36:25] Because I'm wondering if. If I'm just wondering what happened to Kane during the flood, but we'll probably come back to that, I'm guessing.

John Larsen [00:36:31] Well, there was a dinghy. He has a little. There was a little boat.

John Dehlin [00:36:35] Yeah,

John Larsen [00:36:38] I was watching. By the way, if you. If you're about my age and you. You were around in the, in the 2000s with Adult Swim and Seth Green did Robot Chicken. Robot Chicken is available on HBO now. And there was a little vignette in there where, you know, the boat leaves and the minotaurs show up and the unicorns show up and the dinosaurs show up and all these. So. Because that's, that's so. I don't know, maybe he, maybe he wrote a flying unicorn. Who knows?

John Dehlin [00:37:05] Okay.

John Larsen [00:37:06] How did Kane survive the flood? Why are people always trying to ruin a good story with their. With their smarmy damn liberals? All right, all right. So Ham was one of the three sons of Noah. And it specifies in the Bible that he was the father of Cana. Now in, in post, the post deluge, in the, the book of the Bible, you have the, the Philistines who are the principal enemy, who are Canaanites. Now, anthropologists suggest that, that when we look at archaeological digs of human remains that everybody who lived in Palestine is basically related. Don't tell them.

Racial Origins in Ancient Israelite Tradition

John Larsen [00:37:47] Don't. Don't tell the Jews and the Palestinians today, they're cousins, but we're the, the Canaanites as a distinct people. There's very scant archaeological evidence. I feel I must put that out. But the Bible identifies that Ham was the father of Cana, which would be the other people who lived around the Jews. And that that racist belief that we talked about before continued through that the Canaanites were black.

John Larsen [00:38:19] And so Ham was the father of all the inhabitants of Africa. So when, when the. Why do you keep laughing? I don't know where the aboriginals came. You know, in Australia, there's just so

Carah Burrell [00:38:34] many other things we're not thinking about. Like what if they were just the moon Quakers and that' where Cain went to go live until they all. Like, there's so many.

John Larsen [00:38:41] Like, well, if he couldn't, he could. Maybe he just, maybe he just could breathe underwater like Aquaman. He couldn't die. Right. So I don't know. Okay. Part of this becomes a justification in the Bible because slavery is, is practiced throughout the Bible and Canaanites enslaved Jews and Jews enslaved Canaanites. And it goes, it goes back and forth throughout the whole book. But Mormonism takes this and runs with it. So that's one of the, that's one of the racist beliefs in Christendom. You'll find a lot of, you know, Baptist evangelicals who still believe this to this day. And if, if you're not seeing that America is still a very racist place, you're not paying attention.

John Dehlin [00:39:25] So can I just process one quick thing? Okay, so I'm trying, and I don't mean to make it serious, and I'll try not to, but I'm.

John Larsen [00:39:36] I don't know what you're talking about.

John Dehlin [00:39:37] This is facts. This is history. So I'm trying to think about, like, how this happened. So, you know, let's just say this, this teaching or thought emerges in the medieval times. Like you say, it's a bunch of white Europeans with a biblical worldview.

John Dehlin [00:39:56] And they realize that white people produce white babies, but at some point through trade, they realize that there are also black Babies being born. And they're thinking, how did black people come from white babies? Because clearly the world started with Adam and Eve. And, and clearly Adam and Eve were white, right? And clearly their descendants, Jews are white. Ish. And, and clearly we're white. And so, you know, and the earth's only 6,000 years old anyway, because the Bible tells us that. So where did these black babies come from? And so it just seems pretty clear to me that this, this teaching about Cain and the mark, it's like, oh, wait, there was a mark.

John Dehlin [00:40:35] And that's where, you know, bibliocentric, uneducated, pre enlightened, medieval white, Western Europeans. This is how they made sense of the fact that there were dark babies.

John Larsen [00:40:51] Yeah, I think so. And I think that came along a little bit later. I mean, if we look at the history of Christianity, I'm going to give you Christianity in three minutes. So, so Jesus was very much an egalitarian teacher. I've been wearing. We were talking about coming on and talking about what I really like about Jesus and his teachings.

Christianity, Slavery, and the Curse of Ham

John Larsen [00:41:08] And so the religion, Christianity slid mostly among disenfranchised population. The Jews at the time were under occupation. They'd been under occupation since the Greeks and they were under occupation by the Romans. Of course. You can go watch the Life of Brian, he'll tell you all about that.

John Larsen [00:41:27] And, and then it spread throughout basically the slave class, primarily through Rome. And slavery was huge until, and it stayed kind of a secondary people's religion until Constantine, who conquered under the cross, who slaughtered, you know, we're talking about bloodshed, right at that point, Christianity flipped on its head and it became the religion of the ruling class. And my belief is that Christianity is really malleable. Jesus didn't say a whole lot and it makes it really easy to take his teaching, apply it to everything. So I think these teachings about the Canaanites really took hold in Europe starting in what, seventh century, eighth century, when the Crusades began.

John Larsen [00:42:09] Because after the Moors invaded Spain and had taken over control over all the Middle east, the European kings and princes felt threatened. So Christianity gave them fuel to drive these slaughter trips, you know, and, and the first Crusade, if I remember, I'm just pulling this out of my head, was very successful. And the rest of them basically weren't they, they were very bloody affairs. And the wars went on for a long, long, long time, you know, five, six hundred years.

John Larsen [00:42:37] So the, the, until colonialism, until like the, the 1600s, the late 1500s, 1600s, that's when we start seeing colonialized peoples throughout Africa. And that's when the African slave trade and the Asian slave trade and the Indian, Native American slave trade and India, India slave trade all rise. And for various reasons that are beyond the scope of this podcast. The African slave trade was the most lucrative and.

John Larsen [00:43:03] But it pittered out economically in Europe because it just didn't make sense. And you know, with, with cotton and some other southern crops like tobacco, slaves became very economic. Normally you didn't have 300 slaves. You couldn't afford that. You had to feed and water them. Right. So people would have a couple slaves, house slaves or whatever, a couple field hands. But the Southern, the agriculture at the time made it very profitable. So I see these teachings as being useful to justify violence against the Middle east, all of the Crusades, which moved into justification of the slave trade, which moved into justification of the slave trade in the United States, which moves into justification of the Jim Crow and disenfranchisement and racist infrastructure that we have now in the United States.

John Dehlin [00:43:51] But it's helpful because the Bible is. The biblical worldview is your view of science. It's how the earth was created. It's how humankind came into existence. And it's basically our lineage from the beginning of Adam and Eve until now. It's brings that lineage all the way to mine.

John Larsen [00:44:08] And the Bible, the Old Testament particular is very violent. I was reading, so I should have prepared, but I was reading something a little while ago that they, they're one of these groups that tracks, you know, in like Christianity today and stuff like that. The wet scriptures they're. They're quoting and something like 2 or 3 to 1. In 2021, the Christians quote the Old Testament over the New Testament. New Testament's getting forgotten. Rearing back to that sort of vengeful, violent which. Which is been plaguing our human history for as long as we're keeping track. Right.

Carah Burrell [00:44:35] If you're saying that religion has historically been used to discriminate, I'm really glad we cleared that up and we don't do that anymore.

John Larsen [00:44:42] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [00:44:42] Glad that we're A plus students on that. Yeah.

John Larsen [00:44:46] Okay, so let's. With Ham now, in the Book of Abraham, we have a really close link to Ham. The Book of Abraham tells us that Ham had a daughter named Egyptus.

John Dehlin [00:44:56] Yeah. Because Ham would have still been white because Noah was white.

John Larsen [00:45:00] So the Mormon teaching is that Ham's wife was black.

John Dehlin [00:45:02] Right.

John Larsen [00:45:04] Ham was. So. Okay, so let's go talk the Bible again.

John Dehlin [00:45:08] Because she was white.

Carah Burrell [00:45:09] She was a moon Quaker.

John Larsen [00:45:10] So let's talk about what's in the Bible. In the Bible. So they, Noah takes his three sons and their, and their, their wives and, and all the animals and sails around for. Depending on. There's two accounts in the Bible they're mashed together, but there depends for how long they sail around. Then, then the water.

John Dehlin [00:45:30] Ham, Shem and Japheth.

John Larsen [00:45:31] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:45:32] Is that right?

Carah Burrell [00:45:32] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:45:32] Good, that's like you're scripture chase worthy occasionally. So, so they settle on Mount Arab. They, they come down and then Noah gets like plastered. This is in the Bible?

John Dehlin [00:45:44] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:45:44] And he's laying there in his tent, bare ass naked, cheeks up, passed out from drinking alcohol. The two others avert their, their eyes because you know, they're not, you know, they're not going to see such a thing. But Ham, that little dastardly villain, takes a robe and covers up his father. I don't pretend to understand any of this stuff. I just, I'm just a conduit.

John Dehlin [00:46:12] You're just reporting.

John Larsen [00:46:13] I'm just reporting. And, and in the Bible, Noah gets really mad at Ham and curses him

John Dehlin [00:46:22] because that was awful.

John Larsen [00:46:23] Yeah, well, you're not supposed to see your dad naked. Naked.

John Dehlin [00:46:28] It's like touching the ark. There's certain things you don't do.

John Larsen [00:46:31] It's like touching the ark.

Carah Burrell [00:46:33] The ark of the covenant.

John Larsen [00:46:34] Yes.

Carah Burrell [00:46:34] Too holy to behold.

John Larsen [00:46:36] Okay, so let's go read Abraham, chapter 1, verse 21. Now this king of Egypt we're talking about, the Pharaoh. Well, I just start reading scriptures and you laugh, John.

Carah Burrell [00:46:47] It's because I'm here. Because he knows I have. I'm saying only 1% of the things that are on my mind. So we have espn.

John Dehlin [00:46:53] So when we don't rely on science and all we rely on are these words of prophets, these Bronze Age, we have to make up the weirdest justifications.

John Larsen [00:47:02] These are really interesting. These stories are really interesting because we have myths that disappear into the Bronze Age Age.

John Dehlin [00:47:09] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:47:09] That have been around for a long, long time. Yeah. And then we have this mid 19th century spin on all this stuff. That's why whenever I read Mormonism these days, especially source material, all I see is like 19th century Americana.

John Dehlin [00:47:22] Yeah.

The Book of Abraham and Priesthood Restrictions

John Larsen [00:47:24] And, and so, all right, so Abraham 121. Now this king of Egypt was descended from the loins of Ham. I love how they always make that clear. Like, you know, because like they're, they're writing like this is not easy. They don't have like a spell checker. They're not using Ms.

John Dehlin [00:47:41] Words.

John Larsen [00:47:41] Every word matters. And he wants to point out that it's the loins. It's from the loins from which Ham descends. Not.

John Dehlin [00:47:49] I don't know what you're not from the feet.

John Larsen [00:47:51] I don't know what perversion.

John Dehlin [00:47:52] The elbow go inside. But not the loins.

John Larsen [00:47:54] Yes. Have descended from the loins of Ham and was a partaker of the blood of the Canaanites by birth. Now we're still reading the scriptures here. From the. This descent spring all the Egyptians. And thus the blood of the Canaanites was preserved in the land.

John Larsen [00:48:11] The land of Egypt being first discovered by a woman who is the daughter of Ham and the daughter. And the daughter of Egyptus, which is in the Chaldean signifying Egypt, which signifies that which is forbidden. I feel like Mormons. Where's the camera? Camera. I'm going to talk directly.

John Larsen [00:48:31] All right. So I went and looked. I said, oh, the word Egypt. Egypt comes from Egyptus. Which is funny because that's like a Greek ending. But so if we say that the land of Egypt was discovered by a woman who is the daughter of Ham and the daughter of Egyptus. So Ham's wife was. So she was named Egyptus before the flood. Right. Unless Hamilton. Well, because she wouldn't be here because she would drown. Right. So Aegyptus. Mom and dad named her Aegyptus pre flood. I just want to make sure we're all reading the same scriptures, you know, that we're all following it along.

John Dehlin [00:49:10] That makes total sense.

John Larsen [00:49:12] Which in the Chaldean. So let's get this straight. So the language of the Chaldeans existed pre flood and then was somehow resurrected after the flood when the family of Noah got big enough. Do you guys see why nobody takes you seriously? Okay, so I went and I looked up. So this is knowable stuff. We have the Oxford English Dictionary. You can look up the word Egypt. And I happen to have that.

John Dehlin [00:49:45] It's an English word after.

John Larsen [00:49:48] Okay, so according to the Oxford Companion to the Bible, the name Egypt is English rendering of the Greek name Egyptos. My Greek is rusty, which in turn is a transliteration of the Egyptian meaning. The temple of Ptah. Ptah Pata was Egyptian. Egypt's creator God who had crafted the world via his thought and his word. And also became a pattern of craftsmanship that seems more like what you name your country after than the mother of the woman who first discovered the Nile. Now, when she discovered the Nile was. Wasn't the world draining? I mean, how did she know that this would be like the Nile, you know?

John Larsen [00:50:32] Anyway, The Egyptians themselves named their country Khmer, meaning The black land. So Egyptians didn't call Egypt Egypt. So the book of Abraham is clearly, obviously wrong. Egypt. Egypt is a. Is a Greek alliteration of an Egyptian word which doesn't mean what they say it means. Okay.

John Larsen [00:51:00] When the woman discovered the land was underwater, which after settling her sons in it and thus who afterwards settled her son in it, and thus from ham spraying the race which preserved the curse in the land. So this is book of Abraham, connecting the. The curse.

John Larsen [00:51:15] Now the. Now the. Now we're going to get into some more interesting stuff. Pharaoh being a righteous man, I'm skipping to verse 25. Establish his kingdom and judge his people wisely and justly all of his days, seeking earnestly to imitate that order established by the fathers in the first generation and the days of the first patriarchal reign, even in the reign of Adam. And also Noah, his father, who blessed him with the blessings of the earth and the blessings of wisdom, but cursed him as pertaining to the priesthood. So. So Pharaoh, the daughter, the son of the grandson of Egyptus, was a righteous

John Dehlin [00:51:47] person because Pharaoh's one person.

John Larsen [00:51:50] Yeah, he's a guy named Pharaoh. Right.

John Dehlin [00:51:52] Rittner made it clear that we had that. Right.

John Larsen [00:51:55] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:51:56] There was that one.

John Larsen [00:51:56] And he's only.

John Dehlin [00:51:57] It is your Bretter, by the way,

John Larsen [00:51:58] he's the grandchild of Noah.

John Dehlin [00:52:00] Right, of course, of course. Can I just point out, I googled the beginning of Egyptian civilization and the year according to Google is 50, 50500 BCE. So in actuality, historians are pegging, you know, the civilization of Egypt to have been created about 1500 years before Adam and Eve were born. But let's not let that derail us.

John Larsen [00:52:24] No. So. So we're going to come back to this fact in a little bit. The Pharaoh was righteous, but he didn't have the priesthood. So he created in Egyptian government a copy of the righteous order. We talked about restoration. And remember, Joseph Smith was clear that, that Cain's original sin was not following the patterns, the ordinances directly. And at this point, Pharaoh, who wants to do this, but he has no right to it because that's the gospel we've been taught. Right. You get punished for the sins of your father. Men shall be punished for the sins of their fathers, right?

John Dehlin [00:52:58] Yes.

John Larsen [00:52:58] And not for their own sins. Because the majority of this earth is suffering from choices made hundreds of generations before. Right. That's Mormonism, Right? I think that's in the Articles of faith, isn't it?

John Dehlin [00:53:09] Somewhere makes it very.

John Larsen [00:53:11] You're like my laugh track throughout all this. I'm trying to teach a serious laughing.

John Dehlin [00:53:15] Kidney's laughing.

John Larsen [00:53:16] And, and I'm trying not to laugh

Carah Burrell [00:53:18] in the microphone, but I am suffocating.

John Larsen [00:53:21] Okay, now verse 27. Now Pharaoh being of the lineage by which he could not have the right of priesthood notwithstanding, the Pharaohs would feign claim it from Noah through him. Therefore my father was led away by their idolatry. This is Moses speaking. No, this is Abraham speaking. Abraham's. Yes, Abraham's father fell. Yeah, see I have to remember this. Abraham's father fell into idolatry and he had to restore, he had to restore the truth. Okay, so, so, so the Egyptians, our descendant of Cain through Ham and because of that descent, through Ham's wife. Right, through Ham's wife. Yeah. I think Ham was involved somehow, but yeah, through Ham's wife. And, and, and that's how black skin and the curse that we're going to come back and we're going to talk about the curse more.

John Dehlin [00:54:10] That's where black babies come from.

John Larsen [00:54:11] That's where back black babies come from.

John Dehlin [00:54:13] From Ham and Egyptus. Right.

John Larsen [00:54:15] Okay, so Moses 7, 8. Remember this is the most accurate scripture by, according to John Larsen, Moses 7, 8. For behold, the Lord shall curse the land with much heat and the barrenness shall go forth forever. And there was a blackness came upon all the children of Canaan. They were despised among all people. So this is Moses saying that the, the Canaanites were despised because they were black.

John Dehlin [00:54:39] Okay, wait, were they, were they despised because they were black? Or were they black because they were despised?

John Larsen [00:54:44] And there was a blackness that came upon the children of Canaan that they were despised among all people. They were despised because they were black,

John Dehlin [00:54:54] because they screwed up in the pre existence.

John Larsen [00:54:56] And this, the, the symbol of black skin signifies you come from the lineage of Cain that was not allowed to have the rights of the priesthood. And these rights are so important. The Pharaoh saw them a righteous man. According to Joseph Smith's translation of April, Abraham. And, and try to reproduce and copy them.

John Dehlin [00:55:19] Can I just, can I just make a quick point that today if you try and talk to a Mormon about this, an orthodox believing Mormon, Terrell Givens, Patrick Mason, any, you know, any Mormon apostle, they'll, they'll, one, they won't want to talk about it.

John Larsen [00:55:34] They won't talk to you about it all.

John Dehlin [00:55:35] But then if you try and talk about it, they'll say well we don't know anything about that. We don't know. I just want to say this. There are only a finite number of pages of revelation that Joseph decided to produce. There's only so much that God wanted to talk to Joseph Smith about. He could have talked to him about poverty, about water. He could have talked to him about COVID or famine. He could have talked to him about the LGBT stuff, feminism, like any sort of thing. God could have talked to Joseph Smith about in those limited number of precious scriptural pages that God wanted to sort of communicate scripture to Joseph Smith. And this was important enough for God to want to make really clear where black babies came from.

John Larsen [00:56:18] Yeah, and I'll, I'll go one step further. I'll see your bet and I'll raise you. The majority of Joseph Smith's revelation is a repeat of things that already exist in the scripture. The Sermon on the Mount exists in the Book of Mormon, the Book of Isaiah, and there are minor changes that people argue about quite a bit, mostly consistent with 19th century theological thinking.

John Larsen [00:56:40] But, so you take the book of Moses, the Book of Abraham. These took a lot to get here. And they offer actually the foundations of what Mormonism really is. Yeah, you know, pre, pre. Pre1837, Joseph Smith was clearly trinitarian, was clearly, you know, was clearly very Protestant in his thinking. And these innovations all came, you know, started in Kirtland mostly wrapped up in Nauvoo, you know, so by 42, there was a radical change backed up by scripture. So, so when you read the book of Moses, most of it reads verbatim King James English scripture, including the translation errors in King James region, are included in Joseph Smith's.

John Larsen [00:57:21] But what Joseph Smith did in, in all of his scriptures, he, he inserted very little new information like you're saying. And the information that he existed is all blatantly racist. He makes it very clear where it was ambiguous before or ambiguous Christian teaching that came the mark of Cain, was black skinned. He makes it explicit. He puts it in scripture. He makes it clear that the Canaanites were black. He puts it in scripture. He makes it clear that the, the Egyptians couldn't receive the priesthood because they were black. He puts it in scripture. Okay, so. So Joseph Smith, in every work that he has written, has included deeply racist beliefs that are now ingrained into Mormonism.

John Larsen [00:58:01] And we'll get there more in a little bit. So it's. Now it's time to talk about Hugh Nibley. Hugh Nibley was a star they're trying to wish would go away. He really, through the six 60s and 70s, drove doctrine.

John Larsen [00:58:11] I was selling, I was, I was trying to get rid of some books and I was selling some fairly Rare Nibbly books I have up on ebay, I think they're up there right now that I'm not getting bids on that would have got a bidding warrant 15 years ago.

John Larsen [00:58:25] So Nibbly believe very firmly. And we're not going to go through all Nibbly. That, that'd be. First of all, I'd have to read the damn thing again. But secondly, I want. Nibbly really makes the case that Egyptian stuff is a perversion. Although he loved Egyptology, so he wouldn't call it a perversion. Is a perversion of the original secret order. We're going to talk about the two secret orders. So the godly order that came from God and Enoch and went to the New World and Nephi and all that kind of stuff that has these rights, the rights of the temple. And for Nibley, whenever he finds something in Egyptian mythology that is that, that shows up in Mormon neo Masonry, he makes the connection that these are, these are ancient things. So this little bit of passage I read is very fundamental to a huge core section of 20th century Mormon theology.

John Dehlin [00:59:21] Absolutely.

John Larsen [00:59:22] This, this, this Egypt stuff is absolutely fundamental. And that's why when these guys get up and they do it to me and they do it to my friends, they do it to you. These people who are prophet seers and revelators say they don this stuff. Well, clearly the church is in apostasy by the church's own, own definition. That there's, there's no doubt about that. But they don't, they'll say they don't understand that definition. Right. They don't. You know, and, and we, we see it all the time. We, we see, we see Republicans doing the same denial about the, the insurrectionists. Right. There'll be nothing to see here. I don't quite understand that they were just doing this, just doing that thing. But, but, but I can't overestimate how much Nibley drove doctrine. And, and the idea that Egypt was, was important. Now there's, now we're going to talk about two secret orders.

John Dehlin [01:00:05] I just have to say one quick thing also, and I'm sure you're going to get to this later, but when the Gospel topics essay comes out on a race in the priesthood later, the way that they handle that is by saying, oh, all that racist mumbo jumbo. Well, that's just, that was just. What's the word they use? Folklore. That was just read.

John Larsen [01:00:22] We're going to read. Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:00:23] Okay. We're going to get to that. Okay. Because.

John Larsen [01:00:25] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:00:25] Yeah. Okay.

Carah Burrell [01:00:26] Disavowed theories.

John Dehlin [01:00:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [01:00:28] They say, they say it's disavowed. But like I, I hinted at in the beginning that we call that foreshadowing. The, the word disavowed alone does not suffice. It just to say I disavow that. Okay, so in, in this teaching, and this was really developed in, in 20th century theology. In Mormonism, there are two secret orders.

Secret Orders, Masonry, and Mormon Theology

John Larsen [01:00:50] The one is the Order of Enoch or the Order of Mechesdick, and the other is the Order of Mahan. And the Book of Mormon jumps on this quite a bit. So for Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith became introduced to Masonry, to Scottish rite, I think, in about 42. And he embraced it hard.

John Larsen [01:01:12] Others in his circle were already Freemasons. Oliver Cowdery was one, I think Martin Harris was, was one. Interesting enough, Sidney Rigdon wasn't. And Rigdon never really liked the Masonic stuff. But Mormons full on embrace Masonry. And Joseph Smith says this is the divine order that has been perverted. So for a traditional Mormon, if you really got them admitting what they, what they believe is that the Masonic rituals that appear in the temple now, temples change so much. I can't even comment on what's in the temple Temple now. But the temple ceremony was a passion play that starts with Adam and it's told through Adam. And the, the whole gist is that these signs and tokens, these ordinances and rituals that are many of them verbatim, you know, like verbatim Masonic handshakes and signs and tokens were introduced into the, the temple in Nauvoo.

John Larsen [01:02:12] When we go to the Kirtland Temple, there is none of the Masonic stuff. There's no Masonic rooms, there's no Masonic architecture, nothing Masonic. That all came about in Nauvoo. So, so their belief was that they would see these Egyptian things that kind of had a Masonic element to it. Well, if you research the Masonry, the, I mean, the, the best, the best way is, is, is in the Middle Ages, if you were part of a guild, you were a carpenter or a stonemason or, I don't know, a blacksmith. Oftentimes you went from town to town, town, and nobody could read, right. And there weren't, there weren't really papers, you know, to say, here's my, here's my license to be a licensed electrician.

John Larsen [01:02:53] So they have these guilds and the guilds would oftentimes have passwords or signs that would indicate that you're a journeyman electrician. In the Middle Ages, journeyman electrician had a certain sign. I don't remember what it is electrician. But the stonemasons were interesting because they required a lot of them. When you were building cathedrals, they built cathedrals and they built castles. So they were, they were working with the power moneyed people and they would. Oftentimes, if you're putting up a cathedral, it might take 10 years and you might need 150 Masons. Right. So whoever was the head mason on the job site had the responsibility of picking masons who could really do the precision work.

John Larsen [01:03:31] So they had, they. So if you claim to be a journeyman, you would, you would get better housing accommodation, you get better pay, you'd get better food. And rather than hire somebody who would pretend to be that and then fire them later, they would have these, these passages. You would be part of the guild and the guild would itself acknowledge your order. But the masons were using a lot of architecture and the way they did it is they used geometry and the geometry that was used in cathedrals to keep the flying buttresses and the arches and all that stuff became known as sacred geometry because it was.

John Larsen [01:04:12] And of course geometry was, was invented by the Egyptians and they theorized it's because the, the plains would flood, so every, every year they'd have to go out and refigure out where the markers on the land were. So, so the Egyptians worked out basic algebra and geometry that was used throughout, you know, for the Romans and the Babylonians and into the cathedral building of the Middle Ages. So, so these masons were, were party to this sacred knowledge that almost seemed magical. You go into European cathedrals from like the 9th century and you're like, geez, I don't know how they did this. Like, it's amazing. They really are breathtaking.

John Larsen [01:04:49] So, so what they were doing for the time really was. Seemed like it was out of this world. The after the Knights Templar came back, they kind of had all these things would have secret orders and secret guilds and they got involved. So this narrative kind of emerged in the, in the 1800s, I think it was in 17th century when they came out, they came out of the closet, the Freemasons. Although we, we have some other things like in some of the uprisings like in the 15th century, they talk about Tyler and to Tyler, a door is the guard on a Masonic door. So there's some references to masonry early, but we know it pretty well grew out of that, but it became steeped in all of this religious and including Egyptian mythology, Greek mythology.

John Larsen [01:05:36] And it grew into this, this right and order that was used to bind the brotherhood Together and ostensibly in the beginning to help, you know, train and teach sacred geometry to those who'd be building cathedrals. Well, when this came into the. Into the new World, when. When Brigham and Joseph particularly were. Brigham absolutely was enthralled with Masonry. And you can see in his pictures, he oftentimes he wears this tie pin that's the. The is the compass and square over the. Over the top of each other. So all this stuff got really built into the temple ceremony. They're slowly pulling all the Masonry out. But if you.

John Larsen [01:06:16] If you look at, like the pre1960, right, the pre. The. The. The old. Right, the 1877, right. The Brigham one, that had a lot of Adam, God and crazy stuff in there. So they pulled out polygamy and all that after the 19th century, and then for most the 20th century, it was very Masonic. And it wasn't until. Until 1990 when they pulled out the. The gruesome penalties. But.

John Dehlin [01:06:40] And the four points of fellowship and

John Larsen [01:06:42] the five points of fellowship. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even though. Even though it's still there when you're at the veil, you know, that was giving the five points of fellowship. And. And then they. They. So. So, so what. What happened by the time I went and paleo.

John Dehlin [01:06:58] Don't forget paleo.

John Larsen [01:06:59] Yeah, pale. Yeah. So. So. But. So did you go through before I went in 1991?

John Dehlin [01:07:08] You missed it.

John Larsen [01:07:08] I missed it by a hair. Oh, right. But everybody. But as soon as I went through, all my brothers were like, like, oh, geez, you should have done this last year.

John Dehlin [01:07:15] You got ripped off.

John Larsen [01:07:16] They said, yeah, he did this and this and this and this and this. And luckily, actually, I admire my mother for my mother. My father sat me down after I went to the temple and told me the parts that were missing which made it make sense. The temple post 1990 doesn't make any sense. But. But so, so in this grand narrative of Mormonism, the temple rights were there from the beginning. They were given to Adam, and then they were given to Melchizedek, and that they believe, and there's plenty of writing on this, that actually Jesus restored them again.

John Dehlin [01:07:50] Totally.

John Larsen [01:07:50] And that they were practicing the temple rites in early Christianity. And then the great apostasy occurred and they became perverted, but they just were left in these corners in Egyptian mythology and in freemasonry and all this stuff. But this was a perversion.

John Larsen [01:08:08] Okay, so the temple and I, you know, they would say secret, sacred, not secret. But temple rights are still secret. Ergo, the second anointing, which is still happening today which most Mormons don't know about and which a lot of Mormons deny. But you've had plenty of people on this show who have been through it. You can find publicly sourced books that speak about it. You can find old, old like logs they would publish. You know, the Manti Temple did this many second anointings this, this year. And it's really kind of embarrassing for Mormons because there's a lot of people high up, people in the church who have, who have bought hook, line and sinker that the second anointing is something it's not.

John Larsen [01:08:44] And they give talks, they just look like fools because here's something that is real and that really exists and it really is a secret ceremony that they do. But there's so many Mormons who have no idea about it.

John Larsen [01:08:55] Okay, so part of the, of, of, of, of this, this whole thing about these secret societies is that there is this Master Mahan society and the Book of Mormon, it goes through quite a bit. I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole. But it gets set up from very beginning and they're, they infiltrate government and there is this Kabbalah of people pulling the strings who speak to the High priest, the Master Mahan and potentially Cain is still here and, and Lucifer himself. And it's this grand conspiracy that has been throughout all time. I'm going to read you what Bruce Armaconki says about it. Reliable modern reports describe their existence among gangsters as part of the government of communist countries, in some labor organizations and in parts of the great church which is not the Lord's church.

John Larsen [01:09:45] So I should take make a footnote here. There are two churches that are spoken of in Mormon scripture. The Church of the Devil and the Church of, of. Of God. The Church of the Lamb.

John Dehlin [01:09:54] That's in the Book of Mormon, right?

John Larsen [01:09:56] It's in the Book of Mormon and two churches.

John Dehlin [01:09:58] We're gonna talk about that, we're talking

John Larsen [01:09:59] about the Catholic Church in a minute. Yeah, but, but this, the, the, the great and abominable church is a product of the grand conspiracy. It is not the grand conspiracy itself. Just like the Gandhi had robbers were a product of the grand conspiracy. It's not the conspiracy itself.

John Larsen [01:10:17] Speaking of these latter day conditions now. So, so he just named off gangsters, communists and unions. That's what prophets here and Revelator just told you. The Lord commandeth you that when this is Moroni, the Lord commandeth you that when you shall see these things among you that you shall wake into a sense of your awful situation because of the secret combinations which shall be among you. For it cometh to pass that whoso build it up seeks to overflow the freedom of all lands, nations and countries. That's in ether 8 14. So what do we have here? In, in modern scripture we're told that. And, and we were told by prophets, heres and revelators that, that communism, socialism, the blacks, gangsters and unions.

John Larsen [01:11:03] Unions, among other things, are all manifestations of this grand conspiracy. So, so Mormonism, let's make this very clear. Mormonism believes that there is an elite group of liberals that is behind this political scene pulling the strings that murders, rapes, traffics in children and, and, and, and does. These things have been with us from the beginning of time. That is a Mormon Central 20th century, 19th century Mormon belief. Yeah. That is not fringe.

John Dehlin [01:11:36] Yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [01:11:39] Okay. So the great apostasy occurs and then the whore of Babylon steps in, which is the Catholic Church. Let's be very, let's be very explicit about that, quoting Bruce Armaconkey. The Roman Catholic Church specifically singled out, set apart, described and designated as being the most abominable of all the churches. It is also the Book of Mormon to which we turn for the plainest description of the Catholic Church as the great and abominable church. And now we'll read First Nephi 13:4. This is like the worst Sunday school lesson you, dear listener, if you're still with us, the worst Sunday school lesson you've ever read.

John Dehlin [01:12:15] Or best. Or best. One of the two.

John Larsen [01:12:17] And it came to pass that I saw among the nations of the Gentiles the formation of a great church. And the angel said unto me, behold the formation of a church which is most abominable of all the churches. Which slayeth the saints of God, yea, and torture them, and bindeth them down and yoke with them with a yoke of iron, and bringeth them down into captivity. And it came to pass that I beheld the great and abominable church. And I saw the devil, and he was the founder of it. And I also sold gold and silver and silk and scarlet and fine twined linen and all manner of precious clothing.

John Larsen [01:12:46] And I saw many harlots. And the angel spake unto me, saying, behold the gold, the silver, the silks and scarlets. And the fine angels sure have a knack for repeating things. And the harlots and the desires the great Bible church. And also for the praise of the world they destroy the saints of God.

John Larsen [01:13:04] So, so we're talking about this guy Cain who sets up this, this order with Satan and it manifests itself in crime and in socialism and in other anti capitalistic things and in the Catholic Church itself, the Catholic Church for Mormon beliefs and was openly taught that the Catholic Church was, was, was, was part of this. And, and of course in 19th century America, Protestants were very anti Catholic. It was, it was big news when Kennedy won the election in 1860, first Catholic president ever. And, and even Biden still takes heat for being a Catholic. There's still a strong anti Catholic sentiment in America today.

John Dehlin [01:13:52] Let's see, over 160 years for America, America to elect a Catholic.

John Larsen [01:13:57] Right, right.

John Dehlin [01:13:57] So that. What, why? Because for so many centuries.

John Larsen [01:14:01] See, I think since the Kennedys were bootleggers, I think America loves their bootleggers. So the bootleg trump the Catholicism. That's my theory. Okay, I got a bunch of more quotes here from the Book of Mormon about the great and terrible church. But, but so, so you have this, this Catholic order, that, that there, there are these big organizations that can't be trusted, right? They, they put on the vested. They look like they're a church, but they're not really a church. They are the of the world. They are the Babylonians resurrected. The Catholics are not to be trusted. That is a mainstream teaching of 20th century Mormonism. Okay, so now we're kind of coming up to modern time here. So the question was asked before what happened to Cain?

John Dehlin [01:14:47] Right.

John Larsen [01:14:47] Well, luckily we have prophecies to let us know. Now. There was an apostle named David Patrick. He was one of the original 12. Kind of an interesting fella. I would, I would encourage people to go read about him. And he disappears in history mysteriously.

John Larsen [01:15:06] He was an original member of the Restored Quorum of the twelve Apostles and he was ordained to that position by the three witnesses. So he, according to Mormonism, he was ordained by angels. Right. So this is, you know, this is the first quorum of 12, right? Like, like in the, in modern ages. These are really important guys. You know, before. Oh no, I, I just missed my history. I'm sorry. Patton died at the, at the battle Crooked river. And he dropped. He died during the Missouri wars, so he died a mortar martyr.

John Larsen [01:15:44] Sorry I said mortar. My, my, my. Whenever we would cry when we were kids, my mom always called us a martyr, but she had a Utah accent, so she always call us a mortar. So I still tell people they're mortars when they're. Okay. So this is what David Patton said. As I was riding along the road on my mule, I suddenly noticed a very strange Personage walking beside me. His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in the saddle. He wore no clothing, but was covered in hair.

John Larsen [01:16:12] His skin was very dark. I asked him where he dwelt and he replied that he had no home, that he was a wanderer on the earth and traveled to and fro. Fro. He said he was very miserable creature and that he had earnestly sought death during his sojourn upon the earth, but that he could not die and his mission was to destroy the souls of men. I rebuked him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by virtue of the holy priesthood and commanded him to go hence. And he immediately departed out of my sight. You know what really bugs me about prophecy revelators is their lack of imagination.

John Larsen [01:16:42] So imagine yourself on a steamy night in New York and you're on your mule going along, you know, just training town. You're kind of bored and tired and this great big hairy fella comes walking up along you and you're like, whoa there, my good man.

John Dehlin [01:16:59] Where do you go?

John Larsen [01:17:00] Where do you come from? Oh, I'm a sojourner on this earth. I wander to and fro and try to enslave mankind. It's not like, can I buy you an ale? I want to hear more about your journey, my strange hairy friend. No. He raises his hand in square and rebukes this guy to science is lost the discovery because he had a happy trigger finger. Oh, David Patton. Now what's funny about that quote is it was quoted in the book Miracle of Forgiveness, which is probably the second best selling Mormon book of all time and another one that you can't get anymore. But Spencer W. Kimball quotes this directly and says, who's to say? But we all know who Cain is. Every Mormon knows it's Sam Squatch. It's Sasquatch. It is Bigfoot.

John Dehlin [01:17:51] Absolutely. Can I just say, I was told this story by Lawrence Layton. My seminary teacher in the 80s told me the story of Cain and the dude riding on the horse and looking over. And Cain was so massive that he saw. He. He saw him eye to eye and looked over and he was super hairy. And. And I was taught that as truth in the 80s as a Mormon seminary student.

Bigfoot, Cain, and Mormon Folk Belief

John Larsen [01:18:17] Absolutely. It was not a marginal teaching. And in the 70s and 80s when I grew up, rather than tell ghost stories around fires, people would tell Sasquatch stories. Yeah, like everybody had a sighting and there were some major sightings in the 80s in Utah that. That like spun people up quite, quite a bit, you know. We were afraid of backtracking Dungeons and Dragons and Bigfoot in, in the 80s.

Carah Burrell [01:18:41] One Mormon speaker came to my youth conference when I was a teenager actually and told a story about how he saw Bigfoot and compared it to. Nobody is going to believe me, but I have the same conviction. And Joseph Smith is a prophet and I was a little 12 year old watching it going like, oh, okay, that's what you have. Just crazy things. Just believe crazy things. He was never invited back.

John Larsen [01:19:03] Mormons believe in Bigfoot.

John Dehlin [01:19:05] Yeah, absolutely.

John Larsen [01:19:06] And they believe Bigfoot is Kane because more, he's not the only immortal in the Mormon universe. There's five of them. John the Beloved. He's wandering around doing something. God knows why. I think he took up canasta or something. And the three Nephites are out there somewhere.

John Dehlin [01:19:21] There's five immortals.

John Larsen [01:19:22] They change a lot of flats in, in Tempe. As far as I can tell, that's what they've been doing. All right, I, I have to apologize, but things are going to take a little bit of a darker turn right now. The, the. In the early days of the church, it is true that there were, there were some black men who received the priesthood. But the story they don't tell is about how they ceremonially stripped the priesthood from all these guys and who's the one? Is it Elijah Abel that Brigham Young made stand up in conference, denounced his own priesthood and did a ceremony in conference to remove his priesthood from him. Look it up. So the church itself held a teaching by prophet Sierra and revelator Brigham Young, the unbearded protector of Brigham Young University. He doesn't have a beard down there if you know the statue.

Carah Burrell [01:20:22] Yeah, he's breaking the honor code.

John Larsen [01:20:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:20:23] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:20:24] Well, he is the honor code he can't break. It's like Hitler, you know, he didn't have to give a full salute. He could just do this little thing. Brigham could wear a beard or not. It's the privilege of power. Okay, sorry, that was really offensive. I didn't mean to describe.

John Dehlin [01:20:37] He's violated Godwin's law to.

John Larsen [01:20:39] Yeah. Hitler to bring him in.

Carah Burrell [01:20:43] That was our first Nazi salute on Mormon stories.

John Larsen [01:20:45] Oh yeah.

Carah Burrell [01:20:45] Better be our last John, hopefully.

John Larsen [01:20:48] Okay, but it was, it was the, it was the limp listed one, right? It was the, it was the furor's one. It doesn't count. All right, so. So you're getting dark really quick. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:20:57] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:20:57] Okay.

Carah Burrell [01:20:58] Yeah. You weren't getting about that.

LDS Teachings on Race and the Priesthood Ban

John Larsen [01:21:00] Okay, so let's read. I have a couple of books here. John J. John Lund. Was a. Was a reporter in the 60s and he wrote this book to give the apologetic stance on on. On. On Mormons mor getting a lot of heat. As a matter of fact when I got this book here I much to my own. There it is. This is a clipping from a newspaper

John Dehlin [01:21:30] and read what it says.

John Larsen [01:21:31] The title LDS head says Blacks to achieve full status. And what's interesting about this clipping is that's Harold B. Lee. Harold B. Lee was the President of the Church. The. The date on this article is missing but Harold B. Lee was the president of the church for 18 months from 1972 and 1973. So I'll assume this was 1973 but that's.

John Dehlin [01:21:55] That's five years before the actual revelation.

John Larsen [01:21:57] Yes. This article so so LDS head says blacks to achieve full status after every

Carah Burrell [01:22:03] white man has the opportunity to receive. No kidding.

John Larsen [01:22:07] That's Salt Lake City UPI Mormon Church President Harold B. Lee says it's only a matter of time until the Negro receives full status in the Church. We must believe in the justice of God, he told UPI in an interview in his small, conservatively furnished office in the administrative building of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Negro will achieve full status.

John Larsen [01:22:25] We're just waiting for the time. His statement came in reply to a question asked why the Mormon Church prohibits Negroes from holding the priesthood, a practice which has brought protests and criticisms from throughout the world. Negroes and whites have demonstrated against the church on college campuses terming the religion racist. Black athletes have refused to play against teams from Brigham Young University, the Church on school in Provo. It is ironic we are called racist, President Lee says in light of all the work we have done with minorities throughout the world.

John Dehlin [01:22:55] Yeah, we're awesome.

John Larsen [01:22:56] We have black friends. You can't call us racist. Yeah. The 73 year prophet, seer and revelator for more than three millennium Mormon said the key to understanding the practice of practice of withholding the priesthood stems from God himself. This is where. This is where we have to be very clear. The Church has taken a position now that it was a racist teaching that was a racist product of the times. But the Church very clearly taught where the teaching comes from and it shows up right here in a newspaper article from 1973.

John Dehlin [01:23:29] I did not know that article existed.

John Larsen [01:23:33] Life before birth Mormons believe that not only do persons have a life after death, they have a pre existence or life before birth. When a child is born, they believe he comes from a spirit living with God in heaven. And President Lee said A person's status on earth depends upon his conduct in the pre existence. This is much the same as a general belief that a person's destination after death depends on his earthly existence. So this book that Lund wrote, he makes very clear in the introduction to

John Dehlin [01:24:04] it that by the way, that that article must be basically saying. It must be like the Brethren are thinking, man, we're getting all this heat, all these protests from Stanford and Wyoming and all these athletic protests etc that we're getting embarrassed. We can't make the change yet because we don't have the, we don't have unanimity in the quorum. There's still a couple holdouts. You know, maybe, maybe it's Marky Peterson, maybe it's Ezra Taft Benson. Who knows who the holdouts are? Maybe it's Harold B. Lee himself. But we gotta say something. So let's basically say it's coming, it's coming, it's God, it's God. So he's putting it on God, right? Well, and then they're just saying, hey guys, just wait, it's coming, right?

John Larsen [01:24:46] Yeah, yeah. And McKay was famous for saying this kind of stuff. Well, It'll come.

John Dehlin [01:24:49] But McKay's dead by then, right?

John Larsen [01:24:50] McKay's dead. And, and Lee was a disciple of McKay. Yeah, literally because he was, he was in the first presidency. Lee was one of the, the hardliners, but he didn't, he didn't serve for very long, so he didn't really have any chance to make changes. By the way, in the article, if you're going to read it, it describes him as a young, spry man. The, the author says that he looks like a man who's in his 50s and he died just a few months after that. Yeah, I can't remember what got Lee.

John Dehlin [01:25:16] It wasn't expected.

John Larsen [01:25:17] Kimball. It wasn't expected. Kimball ran with it. It was, it was 1978, of course, when Kimball revoked. And they didn't do it with. They just basically said the, the prohibition is revoked. There wasn't a lot of doctrinal exposition. They did make, make McConkie get up later and repudiate some of the things he said. But, and he said my understanding was the understanding of the time. But I will contend that the doctrinal underpinnings that we've been kind of going over have not been repudiated and they're still ever present. The scriptures still say that ham and, and, and all that kind of stuff. But I'm going to read you this. It is the Mormon. Well, let me, let Me.

John Dehlin [01:25:58] This is from the church in the Negro.

John Larsen [01:26:00] This is from the church and the Negro. And I keep, I keep trying to say Lund makes very clear that he is not speaking for the church, but the church brethren asked him to write this book. Right. And they approved his, his writing. And it, it, it was, it was a time in desert and you could find a lot. There were a lot of copies of this book distributed because Mormons were in it, were in a hard spot lot, especially in the 70s. And if you think this, this will kind of blow your mind. Roots, the miniseries, the, the, the, the Alex Haley. Alex Haley came out in 1977.

John Dehlin [01:26:27] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:26:28] The church did not change its stand till a year later. So while Roots was being broadcast on tv, Mormons were still actively discriminating against black people. Yeah. And to get a sense of when this was. I remember Roots, Star wars came out in 1977.

John Dehlin [01:26:44] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:26:44] So when Star wars came out, when you see Chewbacca roar up on the screen, just remind yourself that at that time Mormons still were a racist organization that would not allow blacks in its ranks of leadership.

John Dehlin [01:26:55] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Larsen [01:26:57] Okay. It is The Mormon belief 14 years

John Dehlin [01:27:00] after the Civil Rights act of 1964 was passed.

John Larsen [01:27:02] Right, right.

John Dehlin [01:27:03] 14 years. You know, it took. Yeah.

John Larsen [01:27:06] And we're going to talk about what they were saying about the civil rights hearings.

John Dehlin [01:27:09] Yeah, we'll get there.

John Larsen [01:27:11] It is the Mormon belief that our premortal state there were a large number of individuals who due to some act or behavior of their own in the pre existence forfeited the right to hold the priesthood during their mortal lives, but would be allowed to possess the priesthood in the due time of the Lord. It is not specifically known when these individuals did or did not do in the pre existence to be denied the priesthood. It is only known that whatever it was, it was a matter of individual responsibility and choice. We are told by our prophets, both ancient modern, that these individuals would all be assigned to the same race and that they would all come to.

John Larsen [01:27:42] They would all come through a lineage which would be forbidden the priesthood during mortality. Therefore the Lord prepared a way through the lineage of Cain for these spirits to come to the earth. But under the restriction of priesthood, this group is known today as a Negroid race.

John Larsen [01:27:58] And then we're gonna. There's a. We're in quote Joseph Fielding Smith here. There is a reason why one man is born black with with other disadvantages, while another is born white with great advantages. The reason is that we once had an estate before we came here and were obedient More or less to the laws that were given us there. Those who were faithful in all things there received greater blessings here. And those who are not so faithful receive less. Every man had his agency there and men received rewards here based upon their action there. Just as they will receive rewards here after for deeds they do in this body.

John Larsen [01:28:34] The Negro evidently is receiving the rewards of his merit. So there are icebergs and there's the tips of the icebergs. And the tip of the iceberg was that blacks were not allowed the priesthood, so they were effectively not allowed to participate in the saving rights.

John Larsen [01:28:53] The, the ones that we talked about that Cain perverted and Joseph Smith said Cain didn't do them right. These important things that you cannot get into heaven unless you do certain rights. We believe that so strongly in the Mormon faith that we do them vicariously for the dead. We believe that everyone has to receive these rights. Right?

John Larsen [01:29:11] So we were denying black stats. We chopped the top off that, that, that iceberg. Well now it just pops up further. The problem is there is a lot of this, there is a lot of justification doctrinally given over the pulpit to explain why black people can't receive the priesthood. And the explanation is that there was a pre existence and some of us were better than others in the pre existence.

John Larsen [01:29:40] So whatever is being manifest to blacks, if they're living in poor conditions, if they have poor schools, if they're arrested at higher rates for the same crimes that white people commit, if they're drafted at higher rates and die in wars at higher rates, if they're denied basic health care, if they are not allowed to walk in the front door of the Hotel Utah even when they're performing in the tabernacle the next day, all of these things they deserve because of the pre existence.

John Dehlin [01:30:09] It can't be us being racist.

John Larsen [01:30:11] Very clearly the God took all the shit bags from the pre existence and wrapped them all up in one race. This is just to be clear, this is reprehensible teaching and I do not ascribe to it at all. But it is the teaching of the church and remains the teaching of the church.

John Dehlin [01:30:29] And it's rooted in Joseph's channeled revelation from God to Moses to Joseph Smith. So you can't, you can't walk it back as folklore, right?

John Larsen [01:30:43] You cannot. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were deeply, deeply racist people. And they wrote the scripture and set up the church and the Mormon Church is deeply, deeply racist. You cannot extract yourself from this teaching by just simply giving black people the

John Dehlin [01:31:04] priesthood and retain Joseph Smith as A prophet, seer and revelator. No, because it's not like this was just something he said on the way to seeing Zelf. This is something God took the time to tell Joseph and then Joseph wrote it down in one of the finite pages of scripture that Joseph produced. Yeah.

John Larsen [01:31:21] Blacks in the priesthood was just a byproduct of a religion that rewrote the Bible to make it more racist. It does not say in the Bible the Cain was black. It says in the Mormon Bible that Cain was black. It does not say in the Bible that Ham was black. It says in the Mormon Bible that Ham was black. It does not say the Canaanites were black. It says in the Mormon Bible the Canaanites were black. It doesn't say anywhere the Egyptians couldn't partake in the gospel or become Jews because they were Egyptians. It says in the Mormon scripture that those things are present.

John Larsen [01:31:57] This is a racist teaching backed by racist prophets in with racist practices and beliefs. And they are all still present. They gave everyone the priesthood. Yes, but the Pearl of Great Price and the Book of Mormon are still scripture and they are still honored as scripture. And they say they repudiate, but there has been no attempt whatsoever to repudiate any of this.

John Larsen [01:32:26] Yeah, Kimmy just reminded me my, my. My son went to seminary. My stepson went to seminary. And up until they. His seminary teacher taught him this. And he walked out of the room. He said he, he. He won't have anything to do with it. Let's see, I have in here somewhere I need to find. Okay, so let's read second Nephi 5. 21 and. But we're gonna.

John Dehlin [01:32:51] Wait, there's more.

John Larsen [01:32:52] Oh yeah, yeah, there's more. And he had caused a cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore curse because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him. And they become like unto flint. Wherefore as they were white. This is talking about the Lamanites. And exceedingly fair and delightsome. The word fair is a is was added in the 1837 edition of the Book of Mormon. Before that it says white and delightsome. Because as they were white. And exceedingly affair and delightsome, they. They might not be enticed unto my people. The Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them that they might not be enticed.

John Dehlin [01:33:28] Enticing.

John Larsen [01:33:29] Right.

John Dehlin [01:33:29] It's enticing.

John Larsen [01:33:30] By the mouth of witnesses shall all things be established. The pearl Great Price says that they were black and therefore they were not attractive to the white people. And the Book of Mormon says the same thing. Mormon belief is solid and clear that black is ugly and white people are not attracted to black. And black is a sign of your disobedience in the previous life. Whatever shitty things happen to you, dear black friend in life, in Mormonism, are your fault. And it's worse than that because this is the most perverse teaching that has ever existed in all religions. The idea of the prosperity gospel, the idea that the divine right of kings, the idea that the Brahmans are the upper caste, that we have had a problem since day one with humanity, of greed and avarice and violence and the people at the top have always used the same justification.

John Larsen [01:34:23] The reason why there is an Oaks who was just established into a high powerful position in the church last week is because they are an Oaks. And the Oaks believe that they are the divine chosen people from the pre existence and they all believe it. There's a reason there's nepotism in the church. There's a reason that we keep giving callings of prophets, seers and revelators to the sons and to the married son. It's funny, we don't honor women, but you can marry into one of these families and get position. And I've tried several times in my life to start drawing out the genealogy of the, of the, the prophet, seers and revelators.

John Larsen [01:34:59] It is so incestuous and intermarried and, and these families rule this place. There's. There is not. There is no coincidence. You go on campus and you see Hinckley buildings and you see, and you see Monson buildings and you see these guys who. Monson was put in the quorum of the 12 when he was 25, died a millionaire. Joseph of Hilding Smith died a millionaire. Like these guys have power and that power.

John Dehlin [01:35:26] Packer had several homes.

John Larsen [01:35:27] Packer had home. Like, like these guys are supposed to be like serve humble servants of, of the Lord. And I was reading that passage for the Book of Mormon and it describes that the church, the sign of the corruption of the church was fine silks and velvet, right? Like the red chairs, the buildings that are made with, with imported mahogany and, and woods that are, that are exotic and, and are going, going extinct and that sort of thing.

John Larsen [01:35:56] I will say this loud and clear, not all Mormons are racist, but Mormonism is racist and, and it is baked into the foundations. All this stuff we've been talking about is real and it's there and it's being passed along in seminary which they're now talking about expanding to the eighth graders. Right. Got to get them younger.

John Larsen [01:36:19] It is taught in Sunday school. It is taught over the pulpit. It is widely believed and it's insipid. This is Ezra Taft Benson. An enemy hath done this. He gave us talk in conference

John Dehlin [01:36:37] Prophets here in Revelator.

John Larsen [01:36:39] The name of said talk was. Let me see if I can get it lined up. If you can read it. The name of said talk was civil rights tool of communist deception delivered over the pulpit by a sitting acting prophet, Syrian Relator, on September 29, 1967, in which he identifies that the black civil rights movement is a tool of communist propaganda, which is a tool of the great lie. The Mormon Church was anti, very clearly civil. The civil rights movement completely and anti, very clearly black rights.

John Dehlin [01:37:15] There's also. There's also an association in Ezra Tab Benson's minds between Jews and communism.

John Larsen [01:37:20] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:37:20] So it was anti Semitic.

John Larsen [01:37:23] Yeah, yeah. If you read a lot of the books that came out at the time, the Mormon books, they talk about the vast Jewish conspiracy, the Rothschilds and the banking thing and all this stuff that still still pops up today.

John Dehlin [01:37:34] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:37:35] Now, right now we have a problem in the United States. About 25% of the population has said to believe QAnon theories. Let's review what QAnon believes, shall we? QAnon believes that there is a secret society of liberal elites who are trafficking in children and committing all sorts of sins. QAnon in the right, the hard right, believes that all lives matter and black lives matter is not a particular issue that needs to be solved. As a matter of fact, I was reading through one of these talks and it made me chuckle. This one of these talks that I was reading would not be allowed to be spoken in 14 states today because it talks about white privilege.

John Larsen [01:38:17] So you have a group of people who believe that blacks, minorities, immigrants, brown people are inferior and that white privilege should not be disturbed. That they believe in this vast conspiracy and they believe that it is leading towards war and the governments are all corrupted.

John Larsen [01:38:37] These are not fringe Mormon teachings. These are mainstream Mormon teachings. Ones that they like to. They don't like to put the meat up on the conference. It's the milk before the meat. Right. But these things are not strange. If you watch the Deseret News these days or read it, it's fascinating because the church is trying to push the church back towards the middle. We talked about that. But the, the, the, the ponying up to QAnon started with Smith and Young, and it's in the scriptures. So the idea that there's a whole bunch of Mormons who believe the Democrats are the enemy. And they're all communists and socialists.

John Larsen [01:39:11] And communists and socialists are a threat to religion. And somehow I read all of Benson. I can't ever quite make the connection. But he is adamant that capitalism is part of the gospel. Right, But I don't see that, oh, unions and feminists and all this kind of stuff. When we see that these, that these, that these right wingers have these ideas, these crazy ideas, they are rooted right there in Mormonism and they have been from the foundation.

Carah Burrell [01:39:41] Because I always usually attribute it, not to be rude or anything, to just a lack of critical thinking skills, a lack of being informed and having, you know, a global view of, you know, honest history. I always just like, I never realized that it had such a foundation like that.

John Larsen [01:40:00] I think, I think it's worse than that because let's say you were an elementary school teacher and then you had one kid come in who identified orange as green. That's weird. And then next year there were three kids identified orange and green. And then next year there are 10 kids that identified orange and green. And then the teacher calls her buddy who's teaching over the other school, and her buddy says, you know what? All these kids are calling orange green.

John Larsen [01:40:24] And then you notice that there's a legislature in Alabama who defines the orange is now green. And then you notice that there is. Do you know that Fox News has more viewers than the other three networks, the next three next combined, if you take cnn, MSNBC and like CBS and add up their viewers or more viewers for Fox News?

John Larsen [01:40:43] So it's systemic. The ignorance is systemic. And there are plenty of scholars like John Gee, who know much better that this stuff is all patently false. It's not real. They're myths built on myths built on lies, built on myths. But there is a whole segment of the population that we are here that has founded their life and their family and their fortunes and their careers on falsehoods. So the idea that they keep pursuing that, that they keep pursuing things that are patently false is not that far of a reach. They have to. Because to start to acknowledge this, the problem with these things, and this is why we can put a whole big long podcast, you start pulling one of these threads, and the whole thing starts falling apart.

John Larsen [01:41:27] Right? And this is the argument you and I have had for years. You believe that, or you have in the past believe that the church will eventually have to reform on homosexuality. I believe the church cannot reform on homosexuality because the whole church falls Apart if they, they do so. So, so they are in tight, a tight spot. Let's go back to where we started in the beginning. I talked about the railroad sign.

John Dehlin [01:41:50] Can I say one quick thing?

John Larsen [01:41:51] Yeah, please.

John Dehlin [01:41:52] I just, you know, I always get people. This is the point where people write in and say, John, you hate Republicans, John, you hate, you know, Mormon stories has become of liberal, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And I just want to say if that was your reaction to what John just said, you are missing the point. This is not about what party. This is not about partisanship. This is not even about political philosophy.

John Dehlin [01:42:14] I don't think. I think this is about living a life that's evidence based, living a life that values evidence and science and truth. And it's not about necessarily who you vote for other than to say that we condemn conspiracy theories, we condemn religious conspiracy theories, we condemn political conspiracy theories, we value evidence and we think that you should too. And if that offends you, you can stop listening to Mormon stories or stop donating. But this. If you think that we're saying Democrats are true and Republicans are false or that we're trying to say that there's not a good reason sometimes to be a Republican or bad Democrats out there, you are literally missing the point. And I just wanted to be explicit about that.

John Larsen [01:42:56] Well, I said at the beginning, when you said this, pg 13. I think the things that I've read from Ezra Taft Benson, Prophet, Syrian Revelator, Joseph F. Smith Smith, Prophet, Syrian letter Joseph Fielding Smith, Prophet, Syrian Revelator, Brigham Young, Prophet, Syrian Revelator, Joseph Smith, Prophet, Syrian Revelator, Bruce Armaconki, Prophecy Revelator. If you are not offended by what I read you just now, that's the offensive part here. You look at the history.

John Dehlin [01:43:20] You're saying the racist stuff.

John Larsen [01:43:21] The racist stuff.

John Dehlin [01:43:22] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:43:23] The history of the United States has been one based on two original sins. The wide scale genocide of the aboriginal people here who are still suffering today, still don't have clean water, still on marginalized land, still have problems with, with, with jurisdiction and crime.

John Larsen [01:43:42] The, and the people who were brought here enslaved. The, the blacks brought from Africa have suffered explicitly underneath the law from the Three Fifths Compromise held the Declaration of Independence calls Indian savages right. The, the, the. The Three Fifths compromise. Like, like the racism is everywhere. It's apparent and, and it is baked into this particular worldview.

John Larsen [01:44:06] I want to challenge all of you liberals out there and I have been for years and you and I have fought over it before, that you are part of a Racist organization. It is blatantly racist. And if you're offended at me pointing out what these guys who claim to speak with God, if you're offended by me reading you their words, then I'm not the problem.

John Larsen [01:44:30] Right. And that's why I brought these books here. I'm not pulling this off of some weird site. I bought this book at the BYU Bookstore when I was 21 because I was trying to find out what was going on with this crazy nutball who I believe was a prophet. Ezra Tap Benson. Yeah. Right.

John Dehlin [01:44:51] So you said you're speaking liberals, that you didn't mean that you, I think, use what word you're speaking of Mormons. Orthodox.

John Larsen [01:45:00] Well, you don't have to be an orthodox Mormon. You'd make middle road Mormon. If you believe the pearl great price in the Book of Mormon or scripture, you got a problem. Yeah, you got a big problem.

John Dehlin [01:45:10] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:45:10] Because they are blatantly racist. And they're blatantly racist in teaching that black people are ugly and they deserve whatever they get in life because of the pre existence.

John Dehlin [01:45:20] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:45:20] And of course, the perverse teaching of that. So we have the braille road sign, revelation and restoration. I've used the example before and forgive me for using again if I have a calculator that is right 99% of the time, but 1% of the time it spits out the wrong answer. That calculator needs to be destroyed. It has no value.

John Larsen [01:45:41] So if Mormon scripture given by revelation is wrong, it could all be wrong. We know it's not. All right? So you have to make the case that you have this revelation that works part of the time. And then why should any of us believe it? And then what they'll do is they'll slip in a sleight of hand and say, well, you should believe it because you're obeying like you were told to obey. And then I would say, well, how did the apostasy ever happen in the first place? You would have to believe that every single Christian who was alive when the church fell into apostasy was acting in bad faith.

John Larsen [01:46:15] And I don't think anybody wants to say that. Right. Because if Mormonism is true or true enough to be followed, so is Catholicism. Right. So it's Mormon's whole claim that it's a restoration. Joseph Smith said that Cain was cursed and started this whole mess because he messed with the ordinance.

John Larsen [01:46:37] I can't even tell you what the ordinances are in the temple anymore. You can explain to me how any of that stuff is a restoration through Revelation, remember the railroad. Once you say, we are a restored church that goes through Revelation, you got a big problem. And the only way they can deal with it now is deny, obfuscate, hide, pretend, feign ignorance. And that's what, that's what they do. It's there in black and white. And until they figure out how to say the second Nephi 5, 21 is not correct. Because I, I stopped. I stopped reading before we got to the verse 24.

John Dehlin [01:47:14] I have a couple things I want to process with you, so.

John Larsen [01:47:16] Okay, yeah, and then we'll go on. And because of this cursing which was upon them, they did become an idol, people full of misery and subtlety, and did seek in the wilderness beasts of prey. Mormons do not look kindly on black people. They never have, they never will. They believe black people are inferior. Sure, they can get the priesthood, but they're inferior.

John Dehlin [01:47:41] And it's ironic because now that the Church, the Mormon Church, is collapsing and shrinking in Western Europe, in developed Asia, even in Latin America, but definitely in the United States and in Canada, Africa is the Mormon Church's last hope at statistical continuity. Right. We're, we're totally super. There's an episode recently on Mormon Stories called the Future of Mormonism with Roger Hendricks, and he talks about how the, the church came up with this innovation of pathways, which is we'll take the BYU education, put it online, and provide it super cheap to people who join the church, and we'll provide it to third world developing countries and specifically Africa.

John Dehlin [01:48:23] And that will be our value proposition to just educate, you know, people in developing countries. But Africa, it's ironic because, you know, they say the last shall be first or the first shall be last, or, I don't know the right thing to invoke here, but it's weird that for so long we were discriminating against people of color, and now all of a sudden, you know, the, you know, the church is leading with people of color as their PR face because we don't want to look bigoted, we don't want to look racist. And Africa, literally, if you look at. I just went and looked just couple days ago on the list of new stakes that are being open, stakes in districts and missions that are being opened up, you know, over the past year. And I think one out of every two is in Africa.

John Larsen [01:49:09] It doesn't surprise me. And this is a, not just a Mormon trend, this is an evangelical trend.

John Dehlin [01:49:14] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:49:14] And if you read, I, I fascinated by evangelicals, I read like Christianity Today and all those magazines. There's A real war in there going, going on because of the maga. Anti immigrant, anti anti black, let's just call what it is that. But they have huge missionary outlet. So the churches themselves are in huge disarray fighting this America First American exceptionalism movement that characterizes most of the big Christianity movements, you know, like Mormonism and evangelicals in the United States today. As in juxtaposing of what they're trying to do in Africa, they're trying to

John Dehlin [01:49:54] get more and more people to not become statistically irrelevant.

John Larsen [01:49:57] Yeah, I would say I'll believe that the church really thinks differently when they start building out Africa the way they built out Utah. You know, in Utah there are parks and schools and colleges and elementary schools and baseball diamonds and, and campgrounds.

John Dehlin [01:50:14] They did that in Mexico. They built entire schools that were all built private church.

John Larsen [01:50:18] Yeah, the church has hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in the bank. Go, go to places in Africa and just start building out their infrastructure. Build wells, build parks, build schools. They don't believe you just don't. You don't do anything special. Do what you did for the people you thought were the righteous select few.

John Dehlin [01:50:34] Yeah, yeah. And I was told I had a. Well, I have lots of sources at church headquarters, but I had one particularly high place source until recently and he told me that when the church realized they really had to invest in Africa, they, they experimented with the new model, which is to tell the leaders in Africa, you can keep the tithing you collect, but we're not going to be giving you anything. So local leaders keep your tithing. But whatever gets built, whatever resources, whatever infrastructure gets built for the African saints, you've got to generate that yourself. It's not going to be coming from church headquarters.

John Larsen [01:51:14] Well, that's a reaction in the, in. I, I wish I could remember as a Sociolog at BYU during the big purge in the early 90s, he had done research to show that the church ran all of its programs net positive. So it didn't matter how poor you were, the church never, never gave more to that area. So if Argentina always gave money to Salt Lake City. Never, never the reverse. So Salt Lake would put money in, but it was always. And he was, I think he was excommunicated for that research. Yeah, but. So they waited 20 years. Now they dealt with it.

John Dehlin [01:51:43] David Knowlton, was that David Knowlton?

John Larsen [01:51:45] Maybe, I can't remember.

Modern Apologetic Responses to Mormon Racism

John Dehlin [01:51:46] Okay, so really quickly, I, I don't know if this is the time to do it, but I want to talk to you about the modern apologetic spot response to what you're saying, is this the point or do we wait?

John Larsen [01:51:55] Sure. And. But I think I want to make one more because you brought up with politics. I am not a political. I'm not a Democrat. As a matter of fact, I have to apologize. I waited till the end of this. Sometimes I say things on podcasts and I sit and think about them for a while. Last time on the podcast, we were going off on something economically and I said, I'm not a socialist. And I don't know why I said that. I've been thinking about it quite, quite a lot since then. I am actually a socialist, meaning I believe that the means of production should be owned by the people collectively and not controlled by a capitalist.

John Larsen [01:52:26] So that by definition makes me a socialist. So. But I am not. These problems that I am pointing out in the Republican Party, they have surfaced in the Democratic Party. They have surfaced in every political movement. What we're seeing is a problem of weaponized ignorance. And I think that is a hallmark of human existence.

John Larsen [01:52:46] So I think the things that are happening right now are not new, but they're happening to us right now. But it has nothing to do with a conservative political divide. In fact, I see the MAGA folks who make me mad. But if you go to MAGA country, it's impoverished, it's been systematically dismantled. The capitalistic system of setting up big shops, building towns around it, busting the unions, moving it out of thing has left America decimated. And so I'm more of a leftist, of course, but I see brotherhood, sisterhood with those on the MAGA side. We need to figure out we're focusing on each other. It's the wrong problem. The problem is these institutions that make, make that make great deal of money off of fomenting hate and discord and all that.

John Dehlin [01:53:34] Are you blaming Jeffrey Bezos, basically? Is that what you're doing?

John Larsen [01:53:37] Bezos. Bezos is, is, is a high level. Bezos.

John Dehlin [01:53:43] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:53:43] He's as bad as they come. He's, he's Alexander. He's not a good man.

John Dehlin [01:53:51] Okay, so I, I just this week had breakfast with, let's just say, a family member of a top leader of the church. And this, this person's still a believer. And I can imagine what he would say to this entire argument. And let me just tell you a couple things that I think he would say. He would say. And write these down. Or I want to make sure we can. You can remember these.

Carah Burrell [01:54:20] I can write them down. I'll write them down, John.

John Dehlin [01:54:23] Okay, so one is, here are some of the modern 21st century responses. One is that we all see through a glass darkly and that prophets are no exception. So they're going to say that prophets are in revelators. It's not as binary as you say, John Larsen. It's not it's all right or it's all wrong. It's not the calculator. They're going to say, yeah, well, a calculator that calculates 99% of the time right is still valuable because 99% of the time you're going to get the right answer. Yes, occasionally you'll build something that breaks or has problems, but it's better to have a calculator that works 99% of the time than no calculator or a calculator that works 50% of the time.

John Larsen [01:55:08] So they're going to say, I don't believe the church was right 99% of the time. It's more like 20%.

John Dehlin [01:55:12] But okay, okay. So one is they're going to say we all see through glass darkly. Two, they're going to say this includes prophet and revelators. And they're even going to, like I, like I mentioned previously, they're going to say Moroni and Benjamin and Mosiah, they got it wrong, too. And so they're going to even say scriptures aren't really the word of God. Scriptures are just prophet people who are flawed prophet seers and revelators doing their best to write down what they understand to be God's will. But they're going to be as biased as anyone to have infused within Scripture their own biases and problems. And then they're going to say, you've got the additional problem of Joseph Smith having to translate this stuff.

John Dehlin [01:55:56] So then you get Joseph Smith's bias on top of that. And then we bring to our own biases the reading. So they're basically going to say, you have been set up for failure. I can see, I can hear Patrick Mason and Terrell Givens and Richard Bushman and Spencer Fluman all saying this. They're going to say, you, John Larsen, me, John Dehlin, you, Carah Burrell, you were sold and unsustainable. Richard Bushman admitted it. He said, the predominant narrative is untrue and it's unsustainable. But they would say, that's just humanity, that's life. They're going to say that, yes, Joseph F. Smith and Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce Armaconki and Isotab Benson, they made a lot of mistakes and infused Brigham Young.

John Dehlin [01:56:42] Even Joseph Smith infused A lot of their own biases into what they taught us. Some of that's on us for not seeing, you know, for not having our own connection with God and the divine. And some of that's on them. But they're going to be held accountable for the ways that they got it wrong. But. But if you're expecting prophet seers, revelators, and even scripture to be flawless, unfortunately, you believed an unsustainable version of Mormonism, and it's not totally your fault. But we're all flawed. And, you know, that's. But. But the new way, the new way, the 21st century way to be a Mormon is to cut everybody slack.

John Dehlin [01:57:24] Mosiah was doing the best he could. Nephi was doing the best he could. Abraham was doing the best he could. Moses was doing the best he could. Everyone's seen through a glass darkly, including you, John Larsen. Don't be a hypocrite. You see through a glass darkly, too. So let's cut everyone a break. Let's cut Joseph a break. Let's cut everybody a break. And they would say, we're still better off. We're still better off because Mormonism makes you be a better dad, be a better mom. Mormonism helps you raise slightly better kids on average.

John Dehlin [01:57:56] We're good people. We do good. So that's kind of one strain that I'm channeling my neo apologists and 21st century neopologists to kind of respond to. And then there's another strain, which is everyone got it wrong. The only real important thing that ever happened in Mormonism is authority and ordinances. That you can throw all that garbage scripture away, all that Joseph Smith speculating and Brigham Young speculating and all this, even Book of Mormon stuff and Book of Moses, none of that's really important. What? The only thing that's important are, like, the world.

John Dehlin [01:58:38] The world is like this symphony. And Mormonism plays one role in the symphony, and it's to have authority and ordinances. Like, that's our unique contribution to the world. This is how it's all retreated, that without us, there wouldn't be authority and ordinances. And it's the saving authority and the saving ordinances that seal and bind families together. That's going to get us all back to God.

John Dehlin [01:59:06] That is Mormonism's defining contribution, and that's our role to play. We're no longer better than the Catholics. We're no longer, you know, we're doing ecumenic. You go to the Maxwell Institute, half of those dudes are like, like, trying to be. Get along with Muslims. They're meeting with my dear friend Chris, you know, who's a. Who's an evangelical minister. He's. Oh, my gosh, he's gonna. He's gonna be so frustrated at me. He's speaking in tongues. The. The who. What's the church that speaks in tongues? Charismatics. The Pentecostals. My dear friend Chris, he's hanging out with the Maxwell Institute folks. They're reaching out to Baptists. Who's the guy that used to lead the BYU religion department for so long?

John Dehlin [01:59:46] He's all about Danny. No, no, no, no, no. The religion department, they're all. It's all about ecumenical outreach now, right? It's all about making friends with our evangelicals and our Catholics and our like. We're all part of this great grand symphony. And Mormonism's one defining contribution is authority and ordinances and sealing. The sealing power and everything else is kind of negotiable and not important. Important.

John Dehlin [02:00:13] So that's kind of what I think they're saying today. Terrell Givens would say that Joseph Smith was an inspired syncretist. That his. His gift was taking 19th century wisdom and understanding and infusing that with divine revelation. That's a bug. That's a feature, not a bug. Anyway, that's where we are now. And that's. That's. That's the modern narrative now. And I just want to know how you would respond to all that.

John Larsen [02:00:43] What a cynical, nihilistic, dark pile of shit you just laid out right there. I can't even where to start taking that apart. So, first of all, restoration. The whole point of Mormonism is that Joseph Smith restored the gospel. If it's not a fucking restoration, it's nothing.

John Larsen [02:01:05] It has nothing. It has nothing to offer. The old cartoon. Futurama. Futurama. There was an episode where they go into the sewer where people's let people live. And then in that episode, they go to the under sewer where people live underneath the sewer. And one of the sewer dwellers says, well, how do we know that you're not just in a sewer? That even though you're on the top, there's just another. You're just in another sewer and there's another on top up there. And the surface dwellers, of course, say, no, we know we're on the top.

John Larsen [02:01:39] How do you know there's always another sewer? No, we're on the top. We know there's no sewer above us. The idea that we all see through a lens darkly is complete and utter nonsense. With not Even any philosophical basis. I want to hear the proof for that. Right?

John Larsen [02:01:59] Because it's such a nihilistic view of life. It says nothing matters. There's no truth. There is no objectivity. There is nothing we can figure out. There's nothing we can know. So you know what? Like, Mormonism is just as good as anything else, which it's fucking not. Let's take the history of Mormonism. Where were they on? Let's. Let's go through the history of the world.

John Larsen [02:02:20] Where were they on? On. On the Civil War? They were with the south, right? They were for slavery. Where were they with the Vietnam War? They were for it. BYU is the only academic institution that had a pro Vietnam War rally. Right? And we can go, what happened when. When. When George Bush said, oh, there's yellow cake and we have to invade Iraq, Hinckley got up and said, we need to do whatever our leaders say. Right?

John Larsen [02:02:50] What poppycock is that? What a bunch of horseshit. What do we go through and say, you know what? We had a lot of Nazis. This is true. That were Mormons. And it's okay. They were just following along with everybody else. The idea that the things that the church says are somehow common beliefs. The Civil War in 1860 was widely supported.

John Larsen [02:03:12] In the years leading up, slavery was widely condemned. Slavery was an issue at the. At the Constitutional Convention. The Founding Fathers were split on it, but of course, most of them were slave owners, so it went through. But the idea that somehow no one could have known that we shouldn't be enslaving black people. No one could have known that we shouldn't be slaughtering Indians. No one could have known that these wars would turn out into. Into nonsense.

John Dehlin [02:03:37] How about women?

John Larsen [02:03:38] Oh, yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ. No one could. Yeah, yeah. The idea that they're just. They're, like, laced in villainy. And I will throw down and say, we can know the truth. I can know exactly what Ezra Taft Benson said. There's no looking through a Glass Darkly when I read this book. Right?

John Larsen [02:03:58] They won't read this book. I guarantee you. Terrell Givens does not have a copy of An Enemy Hath Done this on his shelf because he is systematically ignoring this. And for him to point at other people and say, well, you're ignorant, too. Fine. Tell me where I'm fucking ignorant. Come after me. You tell me where I'm wrong, because I'll tell you. The one thing that I can show in my life is when I am wrong, I change my view.

John Larsen [02:04:20] Let any of you guys do that. So. So you don't get to play the card. Because what happened, to use an extended metaphor, is it's true, I may not understand physics, but I believe that some people do. Are they going to change some of their beliefs about physics now in the next hundred years? Absolutely. But what the church did is it set up a, set up a university and it put in professors of physics and professors of chemistry and professors of history who don't know chemistry and don't know physics. And they're like, well, you can't blame us for setting up a university to teach an alternative physics.

John Larsen [02:04:50] We were just flawed men. They were flawed men who declared themselves prophet seers and revelators. Now let me drop some real truth bombs on you. God is not talking to anybody. And anybody who says that God is talking to them is either a charlatan or they have mental problems. So every man and their men running the church is either a fucking liar or they're mentally deranged. There is no common ground. Because if you use your tarot given stuff and they say, well, you know, it's true that I'm putting my hands on your head and giving you a blessing and telling you the word of God, I'm deciding you should be in this column and you shouldn't get married and you should be excommunicated and your families.

John Larsen [02:05:30] Because this idea that Mormons are ecumenical, you're talking about one of the old guard of the ex Mormons. What a load of shit. What they do to families today is despicable. Today there are still people being excommunicated. Today there are still people being shamed. There's a reason why what were the fourth highest youth suicide rate? That's because directly of the teachings of the Mormons and these guys saying we couldn't know any better. We couldn't know. We couldn't absolutely know that we weren't getting revelation from God. You look at the revelations given by these people that they honor, they build statues and they are wrong and they're flat wrong.

John Larsen [02:06:07] This is not, we're just the same as everybody else organization. It's like the NBA and the Lakers are like serial killers. And they're like, well, we're just, that's just our interpretation of basketball. I know we're out killing people, but we're just trying to play a game like everybody else. You're not trying to play a game like everybody else. When you declare that you're a prophet, seer and revelator and there's revelation and your restoration, you're saying we are the top of the pile. We are better than the Catholics. We're better than the Protestants. We're better than the black. We're better than women. We are God's elect, chosen people.

John Larsen [02:06:37] And we can bring Carolyn Pearson's plays in here to show that Mormons believe that they are better than everybody else. And this has fed directly into the kind of revolutionary behavior that we have. Insurrections on our soil that have been led and guided by Mormons, by the Bundys and by others. They are all over this and they are all over the Trump people, and they're all over that. They do not get to claim innocence.

John Larsen [02:07:08] We are all flawed. I'll buy that. I don't buy the fact that we're all biased. Some of us are. And it's really hard to recognize your bias, but there are plenty of unbiased people out there on. On. On issues.

Institutional Accountability and Moral Courage

John Dehlin [02:07:18] We're not all equally biased.

John Larsen [02:07:19] We're not all equally biased.

John Dehlin [02:07:20] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:07:20] And. And the one thing is, if they. If they just said, guys, we're so sorry, we're just Christians trying to make our way, all this was a bunch of horseshit. We're just going to go back home and try to help our families and try to help everybody. Bravo. But they're not doing that. They are building temples, expensive temples at an accelerating rate. They are still demanding large amounts of money that the people cannot afford. 45% of Americans have significant credit card debt. Right. The economic peril of this country. And meanwhile, they sit on hundreds of billions of dollars. They spend money just like any other despotic religion that they called the whore of Babylon in the past.

John Larsen [02:08:01] They have no moral grounds. The problem is Mormonism pointed its fingers at everybody, including yours truly, including John, including the Catholic Church, including the blacks, including the Chinese. They told you why everybody's fucked up, but they are not. They can't just say everybody's biased. Jesus Christ. Bring one of those guys in with me. Let's. Let me have a talk with them. These guys need a spanking out behind the woodshed. It embarrasses me the people of their stature and their knowledge are saying such things. Is that an adequate response, John?

John Dehlin [02:08:34] Carah, what do you think?

Carah Burrell [02:08:35] Yeah, I think that's part of one of the biggest shelf breakers that I had, was realizing once you. First of all, it's just an ignorance to history is what I had is I didn't realize how bad it is. I didn't realize how bad it was. And then I start to put together the pieces that what faith should I have. What confidence do I have if we have proof that they are inept and that they are constantly changing and swinging when the people get loud enough? It's not usually a tap top down thing. So where is my faith in these men coming from? What confidence do I have when they have a proven track record like this?

Carah Burrell [02:09:08] That was probably one of my biggest final shelf breakers when I pieced those things together. And then to your other points about the just the externalities of these teachings. These don't just go away after these men die if they don't get corrected. They still exist in the milieu of Mormonism. They are still present in Sunday school. They still get taught by grandpas down to their sons. Down to their sons. And so unless the church. You have, you know what, how many.

John Larsen [02:09:33] 12.

Carah Burrell [02:09:33] 12 hours of conference. How many hours of conference do you have where they're not saying these corrections? They're not saying, you know, when, when people are in my family, you know, not letting gay people come. Come family members, my own family members can't come over for Christmas dinner because they are transgender or gay. Wouldn't that be great if there were things in the church saying, like, if you have been discriminated in this exact way, that was wrong. And I want to make sure all the members know that we're going to correct this. We're never going to act like that again. But they don't.

John Larsen [02:10:01] Hey, we know that all men aren't perfect. So here's a hotline. If you see your bishop do something that is really bad, just call this number. You try to find that number. That number does not exist. If the church really are just men trying their best, then give us a route to help them. There's no help. They don't want your opinion.

John Dehlin [02:10:21] I was reading today about Governor Cox and Covid, and you know, and I hear he's a great guy. And so I don't mean to be bagging on him, but, you know, it's been in the news lately that he's asked the, the, the citizens of Utah to pray for moisture because there's a drought. And he believes, as a governor, as a believing governor, he believes that invoking, you know, God's power within his citizenry is a responsible thing to do, whatever. But I was thinking about the COVID response because Covid's kind of making a comeback right now in rural, in southern Utah, especially as there's new variants growing

John Larsen [02:10:57] at a geometric rate as we talk

John Dehlin [02:10:59] right now, as there's new variants of the virus and it's not, it's, it's, you know, there's a big chunk of Utah that isn't vaccinated and guess who it is. It's not the liberals in Salt Lake City and Park City that aren't getting vaccinated for the most part. It's the most orthodox Mormons down in, you know, Washington county and Utah county and other places. And I just thought to myself, priorities, like what matters in life. Right. What really matters. You know, the Brethren can get people to wear a certain set of underwear. They can get people to care about all sorts of things. Why wouldn't the Brethren, with their power, with their influence, say to all Mormons, we have received a revelation from God, Everybody needs to get vaccinated immediately. If they did that, the entire state almost would be vaccinated within a week. Am I wrong?

Carah Burrell [02:11:54] No, they would, they would, would. I think the Church would split. I think there's enough.

John Dehlin [02:11:59] You're telling me why they don't say that, right?

John Larsen [02:12:01] They're scared.

Carah Burrell [02:12:02] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:12:02] Yeah, exactly right.

John Dehlin [02:12:03] You're saying why they don't say that. But, but I'm just saying they should say that. And they could say that. And if they did say that, it would transform the state. But they don't say that because they'd rather say, don't get two ear piercings. Right. Because that's what really matters. Right? Yeah, it's a, it's a huge vacate. Vacating of what should be a moral responsibility.

John Larsen [02:12:31] Yeah. I mean, they're in a tight spot. The Church systematically has been choosing leadership who don't know anything about Mormon doctrine. They really are, they're apologists who could contend toe to toe with some asshole like me, but they couldn't. The Brethren can't. They don't, they don't. They don't know what's there. They, they don't know what to do. It's clear. Read, read the opinion page. Read how Deseret News is trying to shape the narrative. The Church is in a spot of their own design and they need to just fold. They need to say this is all, this is all crap.

John Dehlin [02:13:02] Let me, let me ask you another follow up question, if that's okay. Sure. So recently. So one of the things I used to love most about Mormon stories and I was most proud of was that I could get a Richard Bushman or Terrell and Fiona Givens or even a Daniel Peterson to come on Mormon stories. Once I, once I really came out in favor of same sex marriage, which was actually a year and a half before I was Excommunicated, that all stopped, right? And once I started really getting critical of the Brethren, and I got critical of the Church and the Brethren because I just could, I was seeing too much carnage and I just could.

John Dehlin [02:13:37] I felt like I was complicit. If I was staying active in the church, raising my kids in the church and then just staying silent at some point I'm just like, like my moral conscience would not let me hold back anymore. So I started getting really vocal and critical starting in 2013. Then by 2015, I excommunicated. So starting with my TED talk, Terrell and Fiona wouldn't come on, you know.

John Dehlin [02:14:01] You know, people like Richard Bushman wouldn't come on anymore. And, but that has made me really sad because it was part of my strategy, it was part of my commitment to always show both sides. So it's really festered in me and to, to the. Because I respect these people. I've met Richard Bushman, I had lunch with them. I've met Patrick Mason. I love the guy. I, you know, I've met Terrell and Fiona. I helped them become what they are now by bringing them on Mormon stories multiple times before I brought Terrell Givens on Mormon stories. There's several books of Terrell Givens that Deseret book wouldn't even cover.

John Dehlin [02:14:39] Now he's running the Maxwell Institute. Like, I mean, in effect. So anyway, I'm sad about all this. I've been festering about it and then recently I've just decided I'm going to just monologue. I'm going to bring them on by, you know, I get a Patrick Mason fireside that's leaked to me. And so I monologue about to Patrick Mason because he won't come on Mormon stories. And I did that recently, Richard Bushman, because I wanted. He makes this quote like the church's leading historian makes this earth shattering quote in 2000, whatever, saying that the prominent narrative is false and the Brethren have been, you know, advancing a false narrative for 100 plus years and still no one knows about it.

John Dehlin [02:15:18] So I, you know, I did a monologue about Richard Bushman and then recently did one about Terrell Givens. And of course the Givens are upset about that. But I just wanted to ask you your take on neo apologists now. So we don't really have Daniel Peterson to beat up anymore, Louis Midgley, because they're literally irrelevant.

John Dehlin [02:15:38] Like nobody cares about what Daniel Peterson or Louis Midgley. I mean, maybe 12 people, but very few people care about these dudes anymore, which is weird. Because they were titans in the day and now they're just completely irrelevant. But they've all been replaced with Flumen, Mason, you know, Givens, Bushman, neo apologists. And I'm just curious what your take is on the neo apologists and their position. Are you. There's one take which is kind of. I talked to David Abacavoy recently and his take was they're important because they're this, they're the soft landing. They're kind of. They're the soft landing that a doubting question of Mormon can, can sort of land in as a way station to them being out.

John Dehlin [02:16:22] If they don't have a soft landing, they may be more inclined to stay orthodox and rigid, but if they can dip their toe into Givens and Bushman and Mason and Flumen Mormonism, then they can sort of start stepping away from orthodoxy and then that becomes a slippery slope to them eventually leaving. So that's one argument. And if you, if you want to see Mormonism be less racist, less sexist, less homophobic, you want progressives in there who have the ear of the Brethren, who have influence, who are going to be slowly taking the church in less of a racist, sexist, homophobic, and more of an honest direction.

John Dehlin [02:17:02] So the, the one hand is neo apology, and I'm, I'm being binary on purpose to then invite John to give response, but it's not because I see the world in black and white. I don't. That's a trait of a cult, frankly. So, but let's just say neo apologist, good, because slippery slope and civilizing and improving the Church from within.

John Dehlin [02:17:24] Neo apologists bad is their enablers. They're allowing the Brethren to never have to apologize. They're, they're, they're becoming the, the spokespeople for the people who really should be standing up and explaining all the harm and the damage that's been done. They're becoming like the press. They're like on what's the, what's the movie with the Mockingjay?

John Dehlin [02:17:48] Help me out, Carah. What's the Hunger Games? They're the spokespeople for the, for the real power brokers that are putting lipstick on a pig. They're, they're speaking for the power so that the power doesn't have to speak for themselves. They're enabling and they're providing philosophies and justifications and nuance that's allowing people to say, well, okay, if it's Bruce Armor Conkey Mormonism, I got to leave. Oh, but I can just Do New Order Mormon progressive. Terrell and Fiona Givens, Patrick Mason Mormonism. And that's a more humane Mormonism. It's less sexist, less racist, less homophobic. And I can now I can do Mormonism. I don't have to leave.

John Dehlin [02:18:29] I can just do neo apologetic progressive Mormonism. So in that sense, they're enabling people to stay. So those are two options. And I just wanted to float both of those by you and also invite you to, to give any nuance you want in between.

John Larsen [02:18:48] Well, and I'll kind of go back and somewhat reverse. You know, there are people who you can see things without bias. But we're all flawed. We're all very flawed human beings. We're all greedy, we're all selfish, we're all dicks. All of us. Right? That's a part of our DNA. It's clear the Mormon Church is not true at all. There's nothing in the narrative about Mormonism that is real.

John Larsen [02:19:13] And the things that people cite that are the good things. Oh, well, families and families are forever. And community service. Find any of this in Mormon scripture? It ain't there. Because taking care of families is a human trait. Find me a society that doesn't take care of their own family.

John Larsen [02:19:30] They all do. That's like a human universal. So when people explain to me why the Mormon Church stick around, they just name off universals. Right. You know, I belong to a place. We have a community center. I know my neighbors, I like. Oh, okay. You know, the Russians love their children too. Right? So the problem, it's the same capitalistic problem. What does ExxonMobil do?

John Larsen [02:19:57] Exxon Mobil makes money for its shareholders. That's what the system does. I'm not saying anything radical. That's what capitalism is. It creates capital for the capitalists, the shareholders. Exxon Mobil has no morals. It will mine oil, it will extract oil. When oil makes money for their shareholders, if it stops making order money for their shareholders, they will switch and do something else. So if you understand Exxon Mobil and Nestle and PepsiCo and all these things, they are. They are there to create wealth. That's what these organizations do. They sell Pepsi water because it makes a lot of money. It's not because they believe strongly in the healing power of carbonated soda.

John Larsen [02:20:38] It is because it makes money. Let's be honest, let's be clear, let's be realistic. That's the system. That's why it's designed. Nobody really has any truck with that. What does the Mormon Church do? That's the, that's the $64,000 question. And it seems to exist basically to create power and wealth like every other human institution. Right. So these guys are doing this apologetics. They had really gotten good at controlling, controlling critics up until about 1996. And then for the first 20 years of this, of the 20th, 1st century, they lost control of the narrative from jerks like you and me, Right. That they couldn't control things.

John Larsen [02:21:17] So they created these new. You're asking why these apologies. They've created a new set of apologists, just like all the policy wonks, all the Republicans who really knew conservative theory and would argue from a point of view.

John Dehlin [02:21:31] George Will, Bill Kristol, William Buckley, or

John Larsen [02:21:36] they're dead, they're gone. Right? The face of the Republican Party now is not, there's not really a. And I'm using this just as a parallel. It's not really. It's hard to understand what they believe. In fact, for the first time in 2020, they didn't come up with a platform. Mormon church is in the same boat. It's an institution that is highly successful in American system. Like for example, if you and I fall on the skids and we need to get food stamps, we have to go through all this sort of hullabaloo. Well, they've set up their own parallel food stamp program where you can get food from the church really quickly, but on their terms.

John Larsen [02:22:10] And they can make the terms whatever they want. They don't pay taxes on any of their property. They don't. They have, they have all sorts of businesses they have set up inside this system where they deliver some things to people. But nobody's getting back from the church what they're putting in, right? However much the tithing check, you know it all, it grows and grows and grows and grows. So I say the church is what the church is and it's basically a wealth creating organization. So these apologists, there's nothing to apologize for because there's no there there anymore. There's nothing that's fundamentally Mormon. Mormon. What is it? What do Mormons believe? Who knows?

John Dehlin [02:22:47] Like Jesus.

John Larsen [02:22:49] Now it's Jesus, because I just laid this thing down. There are very few Mormons who actually believe all this, right? That they, they believe that all this, you know, like that are racist.

John Dehlin [02:22:58] No. Nowadays Mormons are in the position of having to say, oh, that stuff. Joseph Smith revealed. Doesn't really matter. What really matters is Jesus. And then it asks, well then why do we need Joseph, Joseph? Why do we need Joseph at all? We had Jesus before Joseph, but now with the logo, with Russell M. Nelson, with the logo, don't use the word Mormon anymore. We're retreating to Jesus because that's, that's the only relatively safe place we have to retreat to. Which then begs the question, why do we need a restoration at all?

John Larsen [02:23:24] Yeah. How can I be biased against Mormonism? I'm only biased against historical Mormonism. I don't know what Mormonism is today. Yeah.

Carah Burrell [02:23:32] And all of this irony is that you know the church is true by using your intuition, by using your intellect to then come to a meeting place where you pray on it and you study it and you feel like it's true. But then anything that doesn't feel like it's true, you just get to throw that out. So are we, can we just, can we just skip all this down? Can we just use our intellect always and not have to bother with all of this other stuff that gets us bogged down in racism and sexism? Let's just always use our intellect and our intuition.

John Larsen [02:23:57] Hey, yeah. Let's just skip to the good part. Take care of your neighbors. Try to love one another.

John Dehlin [02:24:02] Love your family. Take care of your family.

John Larsen [02:24:04] Look at people who are less fortunate, the people who are suffering because they can't get dental care, because they can't get health care, because they can't afford education for their kids who are drowning in debt, who are losing their homes. These are the real problems we're facing today.

John Larsen [02:24:18] The insecurity of our supply lines, food security, climate change that is ruining people's homes and livelihoods. These are the real problems we have today. We don't need Joseph Smith on any of these. As a matter of fact, it's really fascinating. This was the restoration for the last days. We carried around those plates for so long. And it has very precious little to say about the problems that we're facing today that we weren't facing. You know, like Joseph Smith was born and died right before the Industrial revolution really took off. So we don't really have any like guidance for how to live in a highly capitalistic, highly competitive, post industrial society that is polluting and destroying.

John Larsen [02:25:01] The Church just has nothing to say. So I don't think about church very much because they're irrelevant. They're a way to extract money from a lot of my neighbors.

John Dehlin [02:25:09] They're super rich and powerful though. That's the thing. They're not irrelevant. They're super rich and powerful.

John Larsen [02:25:14] Well, irrelevant in the long scheme, but you're right, they are.

John Dehlin [02:25:18] They're intellectually irrelevant.

John Larsen [02:25:19] Yeah, yeah. So, so, you know, we, if, if I was to try to debate Mormon theology with somebody, somebody have to first define Mormon theology and they, we can't use any of the sources.

John Dehlin [02:25:31] But that's. So just to bring it back to neopologists, they're not talking about theology. They don't care, they don't care about. They're, they're more redefining words. So when neophologists meet today, they'll have a three day conference at Utah State University on what the word translation. Other, other meanings for the word translation. Because that's, but that's the type of work they're doing. What's your commentary on that type of work?

John Larsen [02:25:56] Keeps people busy. It takes the smart people in the church and gives them something to, to burn off their smart calories on. You have to be pretty intelligent to be an apologist. There's no. They're not dummies because it takes a lot of reasoning power to reason around the circles. They are like, that's not, that's, no, no small feats. You know,

John Dehlin [02:26:18] are they doing. So do you do. Are they doing more harm than good or more good than harm, I think or do you even know, Are you smart enough?

John Larsen [02:26:26] If they're doing good, they're doing good. Good is good. Good is not what the church tells us is good. Good is good. And, and let's just, let's just agree. I'll agree with you. Let's, let's use Jesus's definition. Let's take how Jesus defines what good behaviors are. Jesus dismisses like the monetary system says, that's Caesar's render. Under Caesar, what is Caesar's render to God? What is God's. He routinely pulls out of the economic system. You know, Mormons are giving money and involved politically and whatever. But Jesus condemned that behavior. Right. Jesus hung out with prostitutes, tax collectors and people who were, who were hung out in Samaria. Right. He was amongst the unwashed, the unclean, the people who were dismissed. Where would Jesus be today? I'm not a Christian, so I can't say, but I don't think he'd be in a mega church. I think he'd be feeding the poor.

John Dehlin [02:27:17] City Creek. Would he be at City Creek just

John Larsen [02:27:20] to get his posh new leather bag? But no, we know what good is and it's just to me, they're participating in great big exercise of futility. They're playing a warped Dungeons and Dragons game. That's not fun for anybody. Just stop playing the game.

John Dehlin [02:27:39] Yeah, and that's why I'm Torn. Because I love these people. I love Patrick Mason. I love.

John Larsen [02:27:43] They're my people. I'm here. I'm suffering. I live in Salt Lake City. As the Mormons go, so go I. Right?

John Dehlin [02:27:50] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:27:50] Yes. I'm tethered to them. And. And there's a lot of good. I don't spend a lot of time attacking the Mormon people. Mormon people, by and large, just like every other people, like MAGA people, like QAnon people, they're people trying to make sense of a confusing world and trying to bring order to chaos and trying to solve the problems of humanity. And I think ultimately that's what Mormons are trying to do. And probably a lot of the Mormon leadership, but they get compromised to get there. They make compromises. They tell white lies, they cover up, they obscure. Till the point when they claim, like, I ran to that before. As soon as they claim their prophet seers and revelators, they're done in my book. Done. They have no credibility. Minute you say God tells you what your thoughts are, you're out. Seriously?

John Dehlin [02:28:35] Yeah. I think it should be illegal.

John Larsen [02:28:38] It's insanity. It literally is insanity. Or manipulative. I wasn't kidding. Now, I'm not talking about the standard person who feels like, you know what? I just felt like I should bring a can of peaches over to my neighbor. I just had this feeling. That feeling. Lean into that one if it's telling you to do good things. But if it's telling you, you know what, I feel like I need to burn a swastika and my neighbor's lawn. Think about that one again. You know what Plato told us? What is good, Phaedrus? Need anybody tell us these things? We know what's good. What's good is that people don't suffer.

John Larsen [02:29:13] What's good is that people just. Here, I'll give you the new world religion, from John's lips to your ears. Do less harm. Take everything you do and tweak it in a way so it hurts fewer people, hurts fewer animals, hurts fewer things in the world. Do that, you don't need anything else. Do less harm. So are these guys who write their books and go on the talk circuit and shill for these organizations that are taking a lot of money away from people. Can't afford it. Are they doing good? Not in that aspect. If they encourage these people to give money to the church that's wasted on fine imported Corinthian marble or whatever, the people in this city who go to that church live a better life.

John Larsen [02:29:59] They're villains. I don't know any other way to define villainy. Disney defines it that way in every movie. Right. So if you're an organization that's extracting money from poor people, you're probably a villain. You're probably one of the baddies.

John Dehlin [02:30:13] Yeah, Yeah.

John Larsen [02:30:17] I hate to be so blunt, but the world is in a spot right now. We talked about this last time. It's, it is a hundred degrees every day. I'm just working to keep my animals alive right now. And we don't know if we're in a drought out.

John Dehlin [02:30:32] Yeah. Oregon had like. I don't. People aren't following it, but the Pacific Northwest was in the 110s. People were dying. People were dying and topped out at

John Larsen [02:30:42] 119 and then burned to the ground. I use the example of you and

John Dehlin [02:30:46] you think that's global warming.

John Larsen [02:30:47] It's clearly global climate change.

John Dehlin [02:30:50] Yeah, yeah.

Carah Burrell [02:30:50] Was it the train that came through the town and.

John Larsen [02:30:53] Well, the, the, the burned the town down. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. Okay, sorry, I'll draft or what. It was the parable of Utah Lake. Thirty years ago, Utah county built around this beautiful freshwater lake. Boats, water skiers, fishing. It was a recreational spot of Utah county, which of course is the, the seedbed of Mormonism. The lake is dead. It is toxic. You can't go into it. You don't want to put your boat in it. If you put your boat in it, you can't go anywhere else. It has toxic algae blooms, Everything dies.

John Larsen [02:31:24] The lake died underneath us and we just pretend it's not the case. The Great Salt Lake is going to be gone within 30 years, probably within 20. That means the brine shrimp that grow only there are going to be extinct.

John Larsen [02:31:39] Right. The birds that come through and land from, from the fly from Canada down to south, they're there. We're not to say, is global climate change real? It's real. We're in it. We're living in it right now. Right.

John Larsen [02:31:55] And we need to start taking care of one another. Jeff Bezos made $3.2 billion last week. I read you could do with $3.2 billion.

John Dehlin [02:32:08] Yeah, yeah. And the Mormon Church is going to be a trillion dollar church if it's not already within the next 10 or 20 years. Yeah. You know, I have such a hard time because I want to be balanced and I want to be kind and I want to be respectful.

John Larsen [02:32:21] You don't need a balance with people telling lies.

John Dehlin [02:32:24] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:32:24] We don't need a balance with people who are pushing falsehoods Republicans and not Republicans that, the MAGA crowd, they're human beings and they're, they're, they're, they're really confused right now, and we need to care about them as human beings, but we do not need to tolerate their nonsense. And, and, and this balance implies two views, John. There aren't two views. There's an infinite number of lies and there's the truth.

John Dehlin [02:32:55] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:32:57] And Mormons, there's no, there's no balancing them. They're no balancing them out. Mormonism is not true.

John Dehlin [02:33:03] Yeah. And I don't, I don't want to be, you know, we always have this, this burden to not be anti Mormon or to be anti religious, but there are some unambiguous harms that are going on right now. And you've listed a lot of them. But if I had to net it up, a few of them are, number one, diverting resources from people that need their resources. Diverting resources from areas where they could actually do good to, to repositories where they're just building up and, and, and not doing good.

Why This History Still Matters Today

John Dehlin [02:33:39] But then also it's, it's teaching people to not believe in a scientific, empirical worldview, but instead fomenting and continuing on superstitious worldviews that are harmful. And then also taking people's direction away, attention, away from authority figures that could, you know, let's just say the head of the NIH or whatever, who's the guy, you know, the, the pathology guy.

John Dehlin [02:34:13] Fauci. Right. Taking our attention away from people who actually are authorities in ways that could really help us to people that really have no business being authorities. And then also with this eschatological sort of end times theology which is always with us, it's basically teaching people to think that now doesn't really matter because Jesus is coming any day, it's the end of the world. And so we don't really need to take care of what's, you know, going on right in front of us. And by the way, if the brethren aren't telling us, then we really, it's really not that important anyway.

John Larsen [02:34:48] Hit the reset button.

John Dehlin [02:34:50] Yeah, yeah, those are all. And I'm sure there are others. And then it's the bigotry, it's the racism, sexism, the homophobia, the patriarchy, all that, all of that, those are unambiguous harms that, not just Mormonism, but many different forms of superstitious worldview. Conspiracy theories, religion, they're all fomenting material significant harm. And so it's, I don't want to be anti Mormon. I don't want to be anti religious, but those are significant harms. If you care about civilization, if you care about humankind, you, you, it seems like you have to acknowledge that religion and Mormonism are perpetrating significant harms against the human race.

John Larsen [02:35:30] Anti Mormonism is a, is a bogus term created, created by them. Okay. I am for good and I'm against bad. Okay. So if you do good things and we could have a whole podcast on what is good, I'll be happy to give you a morality lesson. If you're doing good things, great. That's a good thing. If you're doing bad things, bad. Right.

John Larsen [02:35:51] And all the other substructure is just a construction. It's not real. It's not. There's, there is no Mormonism. You can't be anti Mormon because there is no Mormonism. These are just a bunch of stories written by people who created systems and perpetuated them. There's nothing there there, right?

John Larsen [02:36:08] Like, like it's kind of like if people believe there's two moons and one's always behind us and they can't see it. I'm not anti second moon. I'm just saying there's no moon there. There is no Mormonism there. This is just a bunch of guys trying to get people to do things. Hopefully they try to get people to do things. So Mormon church gets credit whenever they do anything good and no credit when they do anything bad. And they get nothing for stating they're Mormons either good or bad. That's nothing. It's not real. It's, it's, it's, it isn't a thing just because a whole bunch of people believe it.

John Larsen [02:36:38] It's not real. If we were all to die right now, except for one person, and then the world was repopulated again, they wouldn't come up with Mormonism ever again. You know, they come up with new brands of crazy because we're human beings.

John Dehlin [02:36:50] Yeah. Another unambiguous harm that I just thought of is the amount of time and talent that's just wasted on like temple work for the dead or genealogy or kids worrying about whether or not they masturbated. And going to adult men, going to addiction recovery programs, 12 step programs and marriages. Just wives hating their husbands because they caught them touching themselves or whatever. Like the massive amount of unnecessary harm, pain and suffering and catastrophic colossal wastes of time of paying attention to who ministered to who. And let's, you know, all the missionaries out there, instead of delivering clean Water and immunization and literacy to the masses. They're like on Facebook, trying to find a way to manipulate somebody, to take the missionary discussions to learn, to learn all the nonsense. It. It's a catastrophic waste of time and money that could be used towards actually.

Carah Burrell [02:37:47] And the irony I think, as well as, like, that Mormons always claim to have an eternal perspective, that all of that makes sense. In an eternal perspective, we should focus on the myopic of all these little different things that determine your eternity, your family's eternity, of these ceiling powers. So we need to focus on those so that we can have an internal perspective where, John, you're talking more about like, we're here, we're now, we're burning the planet alive. People are not able to get healthier. They're not able to actually live a harmless life here because we are focusing on these things when there's. There's a higher, better law that religious or not religious, we could come together on. Right?

John Larsen [02:38:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:38:24] We're also kind of undermining whatever scrap of democracy we have left. Like, I was. I was a political science major. I care about our country. I'm not an American exceptionalist. I don't think we're better than other countries, but I think we have done good and bad, a lot of bad, but also good. I don't want to see us have anarchy. I don't, you know, I don't want to see us have a despotism or go back to monarchy. So I care about our democratic republic. And for the first time in my life the past couple years, I was really worried for our. Our democracy. I was seriously worried for our democracy. And where's the Revelation? Where's the leadership on saving our democracy?

John Larsen [02:39:03] Leaders, the biggest threat to democracy right now is ignorance.

John Dehlin [02:39:05] Yeah.

John Larsen [02:39:06] And Revelation should be the exact polar opposite it here. Prove it. You're the Church of Revelation. We are in desperate need in the world today of Revelation. Desperate need. The Church needs what the Mormons claim to be. I mean, the world needs what the Mormons claim to be now more than ever. So if they are who they say they are, I am wrong.

John Dehlin [02:39:27] Fix it.

John Larsen [02:39:28] Show us. Prove me wrong. You can prove me wrong. Easy. I will meet the prophet on a hill with our two pyres of fire. And I believe there is no God. They won't light mine on fire, but he can get his lid on fire if he wants. Prove it. Show us. Help us. Help the world. Do it. Mormons, step up. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:39:51] Be a proud.

John Larsen [02:39:51] Just do it for yourselves. When I drive by those granaries. I know I am not. I don't have any access to that. You know, do it. Help us. Help society be Christians. Yeah. So the solution seems painfully easy. Like everybody, everybody born on this world deserves to have a decent life, deserves to not be hungry, deserves to not be subjected to malaria, deserves to have education. They don't have to have a grand life. Everybody should have. You know, we talk about workable, working rage or the, you know, like, can we go beyond that and say every person should have a decent life?

John Dehlin [02:40:25] Healthcare, education, shelter, food.

John Larsen [02:40:28] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [02:40:29] And the argument to that, as I found out from my family this weekend, is you just want to punish people for being successful. And there is. Oh, no, sorry. They actually said you just want to punish people for having good ideas. And I said to that exploiting people isn't a good idea, quote, unquote. So there's ways to get all of these things and it's not this either and, or that we have to punish one to give to others.

Carah Burrell [02:40:56] There's absolutely diplomatic, beautiful ways to go about this. And I would hope it's from the Christians who, you know, saw Jesus throwing over the table, who saw Jesus dining with the prostitutes. I hope it's from, I hope in my heart of hearts as an atheist that it is the Christians who are like, okay, let's cherry pick the best version of Jesus to give people the best quality of life. Like, that's, that's what, when I die as a Christian, I want people to know that's what I stood for. But I'm not a Christian. I'll just do it in my own humanist way.

John Dehlin [02:41:24] So I'm going to get, I'm going to get viewers and listeners that are like, John, I was loving it when you guys were raging against Joseph Smith and, and the falseness of the Mormon Church. But as soon as you got political, as soon as you brought it to the modern day, you know, you kind of, you lost me because, like, now you got political and now you're just ranting about current events. And I'm going to get that and I'm going to give my quick response and then I want to get yours. Like, I just want to ask you, why does any of this matter? Like, do you think I'm doing Mormon stories because I just want to like, talk about Joseph Smith more?

John Dehlin [02:41:55] That I just want to analyze Mormon church history more? Or do you think that I'm just doing this because I want to just hate on church leaders? Like, no, none of that really matters. What really matters in life is the well being of us.

John Dehlin [02:42:12] I think whether or not there's a God, it's a miracle that there is conscious life. There's a miracle that there's life at all. And then there's a miracle that there's conscious life that can have language and love and families and civilization. It's all a freaking miracle. Even if there's no conscious force behind it other than that just this happened, it's a freaking miracle. And so in that sense, I am a humanist. I care about humankind and I care about animals as well and plants. And just the fact that we have right now this spinning orb that's supporting life for however fleeting moments you know it can.

John Dehlin [02:42:53] Right. I want to see that continue because it's cool. It's cool. So if we just stop at Joseph was a dumbass, if we just stop at the Book of Mormon is clearly a fraud. You're not all the way there. Like the way that it needs to take a few more steps to oh my gosh, life is precious people and life matters, civilization matters. How do we make it better? And so if you just want us to just only end at the brethren are dumbasses and corrupt, you're missing the point. The point is that we figure out how to make a better world. And so if you want us to just never get political or never talk about things on a broader scale, then I wonder if you're missing the point.

John Dehlin [02:43:40] I wonder if you're missing the whole point. Because if the whole point of leaving a high demand religion or cult is just to then follow some other conspiracy theory or to just dwell in some other pocket of ignorance, right. You're then what have you really gained? You've just traded stupidity for stupidity.

John Dehlin [02:44:00] And unless whether you're a Christian or atheist, I don't care. Unless you're thinking about how to make humanity better, how to make our systems better, how to relieve suffering and promote more joy. What are you doing? What are you doing?

John Larsen [02:44:18] You know, I agree with John's right that we actually haven't been political at all. Politics is the art of like forming coalitions to control government. So Mitch McConnell's a politician, Nancy Pelosi is a politician. MAGA is a movement. It's not political.

John Larsen [02:44:35] So MAGA is Make America Great Again movement is really centered on the idea that we used to organize American patriotism around external enemies. We had the Russians or the British or whatever. MAGA is the idea that the enemies are the other side of America and America right now. Their patriotism they love is they don't love what America is right now. They think we're off base. So they have two fundamental things. The liberals or the Democrats or whatever they want to call them are the enemy of the true Americans. And America right now is already lost and needs to be recovered. That's not a political movement.

John Larsen [02:45:13] That's an entire philosophical movement. And it's real and it's out there. So I think it's a part of the reality of the world we live in today. And there's a sleight of hand that people are doing. And it was, it was promoted by the two party system for a long time that they would just divide up issues. So I'm pro life, I'm pro choice. I'm, you know, I'm like for the death penalty, I'm against the death penalty. And they just divided the world up, right? And it was very politically convenient for them. You can see whenever a third party candidate would run that they would always the Democrats, Republicans, be the Green Party or be at Ross Perot's party, whatever that was, or you know, they would combine against that third party because it took away their power.

John Larsen [02:45:49] But what we're seeing in America right now is not the standard political rearrangement. This is about fundamentally what it means to be American, who has a right to live and who we should kill. I mean, that's the problem we're all nervous right now is the rhetoric has all popped up to the point where we're talking about death and destruction. And anybody who studied American or world history for as far back as we see said we only got about 20 or 30 years between major world conflict and we're overdue. So it's really super scary.

John Larsen [02:46:19] And I don't think that has anything to do with politics. And the idea that if we point out the MAGA or the, or the woke left or whoever we want to make fun of has false beliefs. They definitely do. And that's what I'm saying. I am not part of either of those teams. I am part of seeking after truth and reducing harm and creating a decent life for everyone and saving this goddamn planet. Right? That's me. And I hate the Democrats as much as I hate the Republicans. But there's some things right now that we really need to be aware of and they affect everything.

John Larsen [02:46:49] And I keep coming on your podcast pointing out the connections between Mormonism and QAnon. That's not because I don't like right wingers. There is a problem in Zion and me and Deseret News agree that it needs to be dealt with.

John Larsen [02:47:02] But I'm saying basically it is fundamental to Mormonism that we reach this point partly in America, partly because of Mormonism, not in spite of it. We are at the Q and on Crossroads of 2021 because of Joseph Smith, at least in part. I wouldn't lay it on his shoulders, but he's part of the mess for sure.

Carah Burrell [02:47:19] Can I ask a follow up question? Because I think this is very kind of ironic that this was already booked and I had a lot of these conversations. My family came into town from Ohio and from other parts of the country this weekend and I had a lot of these conversations. And I, I'm somebody who, three years ago I was listening to Ben Shapiro every day and I started out in my life. You know, you're, you're born in a Mormon family. So you kind of. Not that I necessarily believed right or left ideas. I just kind of started out with a, this worldview is correct.

Carah Burrell [02:47:48] And I kind of looked with disdain to the other side. And so as somebody who kind of espoused a lot of these ideas or conspiracies or like just was a, I would call myself like a reactionary rightist like a couple years ago. And my deconstruction from being conservative kind of also came in line with, with, with Mormonism. So what I wanted to ask you was what is the, the foundation? Because somebody in my family that is religious and pro maga this weekend does not understand what I do for Mormon stories, does not understand why we talk about Mormonism. And they said to me, I don't understand what you're doing here.

Carah Burrell [02:48:26] What do you, what are you doing with your life? Mormons are good people. They're salt of the earth people. They're some of the best people and they don't need to be cured. And I took kind of, I thought that was a weird way to look at it. Do you think that people would, would look at this discussion and think that we're trying to cure Mormonism or are we just trying to, what are we, what are we really trying to do here with all of these converging ideas?

John Larsen [02:48:47] It's a great question. They would see that we're trying to do violence to Mormonism as a philosophy, which I would say is true. I'm trying to dissuade people from believing in things that aren't true. Right. And that, that does impact. But you know, her premise that Mormons are good people, that, that's kind of what we talked about here. That's, that's, that's what perpetuated the, the, the, the racism. Right. Because we're the elect, we're the elite with Mormons. And this same thing happens with American jingoism.

John Larsen [02:49:14] You know, we can look at the Vietnam war that we lost, we can look at the Afghan war that we lost. We can look at all the problems, but they're not really problems because America doesn't do, doesn't lose wars.

John Larsen [02:49:23] I was taught growing up that America never lost in, in school, America never lost a war on the heels of the Vietnam War, like. And so, so I think sometimes the religion gets around promoting yourself, well, I'm doing good because we know that none of us are good completely. We know deep down we're all a little bit greedy, we're all a little bit selfish. We've all done some things we're not proud of. But if we can say, yeah, but I'm a Mormon and I'm trying my best, then you can, then you can pause there without saying, well, does everybody trying their best? Should I really be so mad at the Russians?

John Larsen [02:49:54] You know, is. It isn't. And, but it's just a hack. And I find what a lot of these movements do is they give permission to people to not to investigate, to not really arrive at truth. Like your family being no different than other Mormon families, doesn't have to study Mormonism because Mormonism is already true, ergo there's no point in studying it. So I think for a lot of people, they look at it and say, why are you doing this? It doesn't need to be done, you know.

Carah Burrell [02:50:23] Yeah. And that the. My family likes to go back to the. By your fruits, you shall know them that if you have a completely myopic like confirmation bias of you are only looking for the good fruits of Mormonism, you will find them. But going back to that, like universally, people want to take care of themselves and you want, you know, like evolutionarily speaking, we always want to take care of our own and take care of our families. But if you just have this, this, this pinhole view of, yeah, all these fruits are good and I am going to put my fingers in my ears to

Carah Burrell [02:50:53] anything whatsoever and I, yeah, there's a through line there, right, of, of a certain type of, of a conspiracy and an idea about the world that you're on the right side, you've arrived at the right ideas, you've arrived where you need to be and you can have a reaction then to the evil of the world, to the, to the other ideas, to the conspiracies that of the world, and you just kind of sit in your little pretty tower that you've arrived. That's kind of. That's. That's the. The discussions I have in my household at least.

John Larsen [02:51:20] America has invaded a lot of countries. We've blown a lot of people up, innocent people. We've done a lot of harm. And if you can say to yourself, well, America is the divine place, and we. And. And God set it up this way, and we don't understand the mysteries of God, you can still create a narrative where you're the good guy. I think more than anything, if you want to understand any human being, they have created a narrative in which they're the good guy.

John Larsen [02:51:44] So if you can try to figure out what their narratives to make them the good guy, then you can kind of understand them. Religion is oftentimes about justifying the cognitive dissonance caused by the harm that's either caused by Mormonism or by American, you know, adventurism or whatever it is. And if you can say, well, I've been washed clean from the blood and sins of this generation and I do my temple work and I pay my tithing and I help my. Well, I'm a good person. I think ultimately people want to say they're a good person, but I think sometimes, you know, just playing to insiders, just giving money to other rich people or.

John Larsen [02:52:19] Or walking the wealth and privilege up makes you fundamentally not a good person. And that's. That's one of the big tensions. That's why these religions and movements and keep popping up, because we have to justify why America is using so much more resource than everybody else. Well, because we're exceptional. Yeah, we do it. We have to justify why we created mass genocide to kill off all the people who lived here before we got here. Well, Manifest destiny, you know, it was God's will.

Carah Burrell [02:52:45] Yeah, yeah, that American exceptionalism is spooky stuff. That's another thing that my family said to me this weekend.

John Larsen [02:52:50] The rest of the globe has been suffering under it, and I think what's happening now really is an awakening. It's not. It's more. Americans are waking up and saying, geez, what we did to the aboriginal Americans was really bad and still really bad, and we have to fix that.

Carah Burrell [02:53:04] Yeah, and there's this. There's this difference that I think a lot of people confuse between shame and just acknowledgement that all. You want to shame me. You want to heap shame upon me for something I didn't do, and that if we all just want to move forward, we want to reduce harm. Can we not acknowledge because from an acknowledgment, you have to be educated to be educated, that means that you have to take accountability for the systems that were put in place that caused harm in the first place. So if you want to reduce harm, it's this circular. One thing leads to another, leads to another. It starts with an acknowledgment. And if people want to interpret that as shame, that's, that's their, their loss.

John Larsen [02:53:39] But I think that's a brilliant point. You take something like, if I point out, well, you know, historians estimate that as many as 4,000 Paiute Indians were enslaved by the Mormons. If I say that to most Mormons, they would take offense at that. I don't know why. I mean, that happened a long time ago. I would not lay the, that sin on any individual. Should the Mormon Church do reparations to the Paiutes? Absolutely. But that's not because you and I committed a sin. We benefited from that. We benefited from the scales out a little bit. But the, the problem with religion is it gives this wide tent of offense.

John Larsen [02:54:17] You know, if I say Joseph, Joseph Smith, you know, was banging fanny up in the, up in the hayloft, there's a lot of people get offended. Not because of the way I said it, they'll get offended that way too. But just pointing that out, you know, we'll, we'll, you know, to point out that this is what Oliver Cowdery said about Joseph Smith, Martin Harris said about Joseph Smith. This is what these guys who knew him close said. They will get offended that you just even bring that up. And that's what the religious people have to stop being so offended. They have to stop being so. Needing everything to be right.

Carah Burrell [02:54:49] Right.

John Larsen [02:54:50] Because, because they, they need to, to recognize that the Mormons were just as screwed up as everybody else. But that makes them not special and they want to be special. So it's a, it's a, It's a catch 22. There's no way out of the trap. The only way out of trap is stop playing the game.

Carah Burrell [02:55:04] Yeah. And to acknowledge a pattern, analog, a pattern of harm, doesn't mean that like you did it. And it just means that like you said, you benefited from it. And if there's, it's, it's honestly an ignorance to acknowledging patterns, I swear, is all it really comes down. And the externalities of the does, for sure.

John Larsen [02:55:20] I think it's well said.

John Dehlin [02:55:22] So, John, turn your, turn your head sideways because I want people to see

Carah Burrell [02:55:25] your Ponytail, you dirty liberal hippie.

John Dehlin [02:55:29] So like, so like I, you know, we have. Mormonism's kind of ruined this idea of what a prophet is. Go ahead, turn that way again. Show, show it again. Yeah, you're like a, you're like John the Baptist. You're like a, like there's this original idea of what a prophet is, which is kind of like this crazy nut in the wilderness who can actually see that we're going down a dangerous road and they're just basically screaming, screaming on this corner of the street saying, hey, we're going to a dangerous place. People should pay attention. That's what prophet originally meant, like Jeremiah, the badass prophets. Yeah, yeah, but we've, we've perverted that. Now a prophet is a man, an 80 year old white man from Utah in a, in a really nice suit with really nice leather Italian made shoes

John Larsen [02:56:17] that manages credentials, who's been part of

John Dehlin [02:56:19] a major corporation who basically is a, is a CEO, executive of a billion dollar Fortune 50 organization. But you're kind of a modern day prophet, I think. I think you're kind of a modern day prophet.

John Larsen [02:56:31] I, I just have the benefit that I grew up in Mormonism. I was able to see that Mormonism, through a lot of work and through a lot of help from a lot of people, was able to see the problems and flaws with Mormonism which humbled me on that front. I'm plenty not humble on many other fronts, but I just recognize the propensity for us all to be very, very deeply wrong about things. And I don't hold any more this pretension that because it was my culture that I was born into, it needs to be superior.

John Larsen [02:57:03] And so that's not being a prophet. That's just, that's what, that why I push back so hard on your bias. There's thing I like religion, I read the Bible, I read, I study religion a lot. I just haven't found one that convinces me that I should join it other than, I mean, if I had to put anything on my thing, I'd put out as a Buddhist. But I, you know, that's not, that's not being a prophet. That's, that's just recognizing things for the way they are. That's why I said on our last podcast, the biggest problem right now is ignorance. Ignorance. These institutions that profit off figure and want us to say that way.

John Dehlin [02:57:37] Yeah, I love it.

John Larsen [02:57:40] People say if they see how chickens are raised, they'll stop eating chicken. And I say you have a moral obligation once you figure that out to do so you need to go see chicken slaughtered or you need to stop eating chicken. You need to live with your own self and human beings don't want to do that.

John Dehlin [02:57:55] Yeah. And I'll just say it again, that if you think that this podcast went off the rails when it started talking about modern issues, contemporary issues and even political issues and such, global warming, climate change, if you think we went off the rails by getting to this, I'm just going to push that right back into you and say, what do you care about what is important to you? And what is more important is really condemning dead white Mormon people of 200 years ago? Is that really what's most important? Or is. Is what's most important what we're going to do with the remaining lives and influence and power that we have now?

John Dehlin [02:58:40] I think that's what's most important. What are you going to do to maximize your joy and minimize your suffering with the rest of the life that you have and for those you love? And do you give a crap about other people who are suffering and struggling or are you just going to enjoy your boat now that you don't have to pay tithing and enjoy your Tesla now that you don't have to pay tithing and just have a lot of fun with your close friends without any care or responsibility for the world around you. So I don't think this is Mormon stories getting off the rails. I think this is Mormon stories being on the rails and trying to. Trying to also incorporate what really matters today.

John Larsen [02:59:22] Let me see John Dehlin's bet and raise him. So here's what I heard John Dillon say and he said it last time. He is nervous that there are individuals who give money. This is not a big high scale operation. Trust me, I'm sitting in the room.

John Larsen [02:59:37] These operations are shoestring and there is not a lot of wiggle room. And John has legitimate worries that there are political parties who will use their influence. And you can sure as shit bet that's why. One of the reasons they give the money to John because they want John to double think about what he's going to say on this podcast because he might lose money from influential people. You, dear listener, had that presented before you. Now you have a glimpse behind the curtain. John is nervous to pay the bills because he knows that if he speaks the truth, there are those who will take money from him.

John Larsen [03:00:11] You want the truth out there, you need to pay for it. You need to send John money. I'm not kidding. If you think it's important that we don't just pretend that global warming is not real because it's political. And political is not this discussion. You need to send money here. The world is creaking right now under the strain of the billionaires and the fucking Roberts court who did Citizens United and made speech money. Everything is suffering. And the only thing you and I can do, friend, is send money to the things that matter. The fact that John worries that the MAGA people are going to take away money and Mormon stories might suffer. On my call to, my call to arms, it's time for you to send in 10 bucks.

John Dehlin [03:00:57] And I think, you know, I did a rant on the, the insurrection that and I, to be honest, I didn't lose many donors. I lost some not, you know, let's just say 20 or 30 or 40. And probably there's been 10 or 20 people a month that have dropped out. I'm not worried about the money so much. When I, When I, When I think about Mormon stories, what I think about most is what's our main goal? And our main goal is around the, the power and the influence that orthodox Mormonism has on people's lives.

John Dehlin [03:01:33] That's what I'm laser focused on. Because if you can eliminate that, then you at least unplug people from the matrix and then you give them a chance to start valuing science, valuing evidence, valuing reality, valuing what's around them. And you give them a chance to start basing their lives on what's real and what matters. Now, some people fall into even worse ideologies after that. That. But when I, when I joke with you about donors, I, I don't think I have a lot of donors that either they, they don't care about my politics and still support the mission or they're just not.

John Dehlin [03:02:09] Or they're, or they're just okay with the politics that are expressed. So it's not so much the money is. I don't want Mormon stories to ever lose sight of its main goal, which is it. Which is to free people up, up from undue influence of a religious worldview that is false based on lies and, and that is corrupt in the modern day sense implications. So it's only. It's more that John. But I pre. I still. We do need donors. We do need support. We do want to keep Carah and Gerardo and Brooklyn all employed so that we can do good. There's more that we could do.

John Dehlin [03:02:46] If we had more support, we could double or triple the good we're doing. So yes, please support us. But I just Want to be clear to you, my first concern is that we don't become political at the expense of our core mission, which is freeing people from harmful, toxic, orthodox Mormonism.

John Larsen [03:03:01] Right. And let me stay again. I don't like the MAGA movement, but the people in MAGA are my brothers and sisters. We're suffering under the same poverty and constrictions and the elements of, of the stage of capitalism we're in right now. And it's time for these institutions like Mormonism to come down. But we each have a moral responsibility. Mormonism does a lot of good in the community. And if we tear down Mormonism, we have to do the second part. We can't just like you kind of implied retreat into sort of a lightweight hedonism and you know, and give a couple checks to organizations we support. Lord, I'm calling every. It's time. The world is in a bad place right now.

John Dehlin [03:03:47] You're acting like a real prophet. You are.

John Larsen [03:03:49] It's. And it's been, it's been in bad places before, you know, and so there's no guarantee, there's no, there's no guarantee that science is going to, going to cure us. We all need to help. It's a time we all need to help.

Carah Burrell [03:04:01] Right on.

John Dehlin [03:04:05] Amen.

Carah Burrell [03:04:06] Yeah, I was going to. So I don't want to go on a rant right now, but this is actually, I might cry. This is actually really important. This is actually really important to me because after my shelf broke in 2019, I was at my most doubled down, most Jesus freak stage, most conservative I ever was. I was actually working for a conservative non profit. I was, I was in the most conservative, but I would call it also the most reactionary right at stage that I'd been in. And I did not like ex Mormons. I did not like to hear what people had to say. I thought of them as all social justice warrior festivals, feminists who were just shrieking at the good trueness of God and you know, family values and they just wanted to tear things down.

Post-Mormon Paths and Personal Growth

Carah Burrell [03:04:48] I didn't see their arguments as valid because I saw the, I saw what people look like and I judge people. And it wasn't until my husband started leaving and things get loud when they need to get loud. And I needed to start looking into what I was teaching my kids. And that's when I investigated the church, church's truth claims. And I realized that my life had been built on a lie. And my shelf all kind of broke down one night and my immediate horror that I've never told anyone is actually not just that the church was true, but also that I was too conservative. I did not.

Carah Burrell [03:05:20] All the second part stuff you're talking about, I was too afraid to confront. I was horrified that, okay, I'm an ex Mormon this second, I can never walk in a church building again, but I can never be friends with ex Mormons because they are so everything that we've just been talking about, I didn't believe and I didn't understand. I judged, I saw with a bad faith interpretation. Always, always, always. That's when I come from a very, you know, Trump MAGA family. That's, that's the kind of. Not that I was maga, but like that was just the worldview that I had was given and I hadn't confronted a lot of the, the biases and ideas that were handed to me since I was born, you know.

Carah Burrell [03:05:56] And so my immediate reaction was that I, I was like, I have to pretend I'm Mormon. There is no life for me outside of Mormonism because no one will accept accept me. And so my first big complaint was I felt like ex Mormonism was a cult. I went on Reddit and I felt like everything was LGBT and I was like, I didn't even, I didn't even know that non. What's the. I didn't know the intersex people were even a thing back then. You know, I had too much weight to confront Mormonism's false and now I have to confront all these other ideas about biology and trans people and intersex people and why people are gay and systemic racism.

Carah Burrell [03:06:35] It felt like climate change, all these things that Ben Shapirot was telling me were all false. White privilege, that that was, that was equally as heavy as Mormonism. And I couldn't confront that. So my biggest fear, first of all, and I've. I usually joke around about the name NuanceHoe is just. I try not to see things in black and white. It literally came out of me choosing a screen name when I joined Reddit to join ex Mormon Reddit. It because I wanted to. I, I wish that ex Mormons would see how what infants, maybe some people like me were that I needed so much more nuance on these Mormon topics that there's two camps.

Carah Burrell [03:07:16] There's the things you were talking about, John, with our mission of the things that we talk about the importance of what we do at Mormon Stories. And it can't just come down to these people were. We can't just come down to these people were sexist and racist. It has to have A bigger mission. It has to understand the implications of those things. And I understand that there are two camps of ex Mormons. Sometimes there's the babies like me who could only handle that the shelf was broken. And then there's the moving forward. Then there's the what are the implications of this not being true? We need to unlearn some stuff.

Carah Burrell [03:07:47] We need to attack the system. We need to actually find and our responsibility for being complicit in the system and move forward. Not all ex Mormons are ready to do both of those things. Things at the same time.

John Larsen [03:07:58] Yeah, you have to keep doing that even after you leave the church. Like we have to keep confronting those systems in our lives. And it's not fun work. We have to keep analyzing our own biases, our own privileges, our own access and say, why is the world this way? And it's not fun. It's not fun. Like you point out so well, you get thrown into this. It's like this is not what any of us. Any of us. The idea that we chose to be ex Mormons because it just fun. Oh my gosh.

John Dehlin [03:08:27] Or to drink beer. Yeah, we did it to drink beer.

John Larsen [03:08:32] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [03:08:32] Kimmy said, God bless the person who has the capacity to say I was wrong. And there's. That's a advancement of critical thinking, as I would say. It's like once you start gaining critical thinking skills, you never want to arrive that you've. You've got the right ideas, you want to be in constant pursuit of it.

John Larsen [03:08:47] And compliments to you, John, and your team of willing to. Willing to keep reconfronting. There's a lot of time in our history where you would not have tolerated the stuff I was saying today. And people may not realize it, but you can go from talking to a hostile like me to talking in a very friendly way because we were all part of a big family, you know. And that's what doesn't always come through is sort of the anger I have directed at the more Mormon people because they're my people. Right. I don't feel that same kind of anger for Scientologists because they're not my people.

John Larsen [03:09:23] And this stuff we're trying to do, it's not easy. It's not easy for anybody. It's not easy for the brethren. It's not easy for you. It's not easier for people walking the line of the church and the fact that we have to keep reconfronting what it means to be humans because humans aren't that great, but we have a kernel of greatness. There's been a lot of excellent things and I have to, to focus on that.

John Dehlin [03:09:43] Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. So great to, so great to have this conversation. Carah. It's great to have you along as well. I, I, so I, my, my oldest and I, my child Adrian and I watched HBO documentary recently called Exterminate all the Brutes and it's, it's a brilliant four part documentary, four hours. And it's about colonialism and it's about what, how the Western civilization has been lifted on the backs of oppressing the weaker. Not the weaker, but oppressing largely colored, you know, natives in Africa, in, in India, in the United States. It's really brutal. And this is where it kind of gets really serious.

John Dehlin [03:10:36] Is as much as I love and believe in processing Mormonism and seeing Mormonism for what it is and then liberating oneself from it, as much as I love ex Mormon Reddit and Mormon Stories podcast and all the podcasts, there's a, there's an extent to which processing Mormonism is necessary and healthy and super good.

John Dehlin [03:11:00] But then there's a point at which it can stagnate you and it can keep you from taking those next steps. And if you're 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 years into your Mormon exodus and you're still thinking about, well, what did Oliver Cowdery do and what did Sidney Rigdon say and what was the 15th wife of Joseph? What was her experience? And you're not taking that next step of looking around you and saying what, what, what is the state of the world we're in? What is the suffering? What is the state of suffering of sentient life? And what can we do to help ameliorate the suffering and advance the well being of creatures and conscious creatures.

John Dehlin [03:11:46] If you're not taking that next step, the next Mormonism has become a ball and chain to your consciousness and to your well being and to the well being of the world. And you know, a lot of people come to me and say, john, I don't, I have to apologize to you. I don't listen to Mormon stories anymore.

John Dehlin [03:12:04] I, you know, I always feel like that's actually, you've graduated. Congratulations. I don't want to keep you watching Mormon stories forever. If, especially if it's going to, if what it's going to do is keep you from waking up to the rest of your life and to the possibility of using your time and money and resources in a better way. If tithing is a cloth, if tithing to the Mormon Church is a colossal Waste of money. If, if doing genealogy to baptize dead people and to do marriage ceremonies for dead people and for old blue haired people to be working in the temple. If all of that is a huge colossal waste of time, money and energy.

John Dehlin [03:12:43] But then all you do is leave Mormonism and don't spend your time and money and energy actually doing worthwhile things. Which is more than just the boating and the partying and the having fun. It's also looking around and say, how do I transfer my tithing to a corrupt corporate organization? How do I translate that? Plus the time that I used to serve in the church, how do I transform that time and that money to worthy causes that make the world a better place? If you're not doing that, I'm just going to say it again. I think you've missed the point. I think you missed the point.

John Larsen [03:13:20] It's a great point. John, should we go get a drink?

John Dehlin [03:13:22] Should we do it?

Carah Burrell [03:13:23] Carah, I'm teasing you.

John Larsen [03:13:26] John doesn't like people offer him a drink.

Carah Burrell [03:13:29] It's so funny. Actually that's funny that you mentioned that because John just did a TikTok this week about, hey, ex Mormons, what are your criticisms of the ex Mormon community? That was John's about drinking. Stop off.

John Dehlin [03:13:39] Stop asking me and Margi, why don't we drink? Have we done drugs yet? Why don't we drink? I don't want to answer that question again. Stop it.

Carah Burrell [03:13:45] And mine was, I haven't made it yet. Mine was the convenient rant that I already went on which was, you know, about, let's be a little bit more nuanced and understand that we come from a very, very conspiratorial Christian church and be patient with ex Mormons. And so anyway, that everything I think is my perfectly said because people often ask me, probably you too, about how do you rebuild. And the first thing I say is Eckhart Tolle book, Books and a New Earth. And we were going to do a panel that keeps getting put off about Eckhart Tolle and the New Earth is kind of around that idea of like we know that there's a finite amount of resource, finite amount of people, and we need to like elevate our consciousness.

Carah Burrell [03:14:24] Within religion or without religion, doesn't really matter. But there's a higher state of, of elevated consciousness that we need to arrive at. And if you're bogged down in the details, the details are important. At some point they tell you that things don't add up, they tell you that you're in a false system. But it's time to. It's time to rebuild now. It's time to, like, move on. So I think you said it all beautifully, John.

John Dehlin [03:14:45] Leaving Mormonism is just the beginning. And it's. And unfortunately, it's a lot of hard work. And watching Exterminate all the Brutes, go see Exterminating all the. Exterminate all the Brutes on hbo, it's sad. You learn that actually Hitler was inspired by the genocide that America did on the natives. And from that he's like, hey, man, if they can. If they can be seen as a city on a hill, a shining city on a hill, and have exterminated millions of natives, maybe I can pull that off too. And when you. That's heavy stuff.

Carah Burrell [03:15:15] I'm gonna cry.

John Dehlin [03:15:16] Yeah, who doesn't want to wave the flag and say, America is great? But then you realize, no, it's not that great and we've got a lot of work to do, but let's do it together. Let's have some fun doing it anyway. John Larsen, always an open invitation. Kimmy, I'm so glad you were able to join us today. Sharing some commentary off screen, John. It's a carte blanche. Anytime you want to come back, you pick the topic.

John Larsen [03:15:39] Well, it's an honor. You have the. All the great ones. And then every once in a while I slide in here and no, we.

John Dehlin [03:15:44] You are one of the great ones.

John Larsen [03:15:46] All of Mormonism.

John Dehlin [03:15:46] You're one of the great ones. We're honored to bring back. I was going to say that Karen and I talked about this. I got an email this morning, a direct message from a 17 year old. As if we haven't talked enough for three hours in. I got a direct message from a 17 year old today that basically said, john, I don't believe in the church anymore, but all my family's in and I'm trying to decide whether or not to go on a mission.

John Dehlin [03:16:08] You know, can you help me make that decision? And I just felt a real burden for that because, like, I don't have time. And I'm trying to think of interesting content. What Karen and I were going to pitch to you is that we spend an hour answering that young man's question, and then we shared the episode with that young man and with the world for all future youth. Because let's be clear, they're active Mormon bishops that no longer believe that are listening to Mormon stories. They're active Stake Presidents and Stake Presidency members and Relief Society presidents that are listening to Mormon stories who no longer believe Their church.

John Dehlin [03:16:41] Church education system, institute and seminary directors that listen to Mormon stories now they don't believe and they're stuck in it and they can't leave.

John Larsen [03:16:47] Goes all the way to the top.

John Dehlin [03:16:49] Yeah. Yeah. All the way to the top. So let's. Anyway, we. Karen, I thought it would be fun to just occasionally, like once a month, twice a month, have a panel where when I get questions like that, like I'm an institute director and I don't believe anymore, what do I do? Where we can have a little panel where we give.

John Larsen [03:17:07] We give. We give unsolicited advice. Or it'd be solicitous.

John Dehlin [03:17:10] No, it's solicited.

John Larsen [03:17:11] It's always in whatever you want. And. And you got to write. Some of you have to write in sex questions that'll make John squirm.

John Dehlin [03:17:18] Yeah. Sex questions. Yeah. Should I. Should I engage in ethical non monogamy? John. John already gave us his thoughts on that. But no, but seriously, I don't want to have to answer anyone's question, and I don't want to be anyone's authority. I don't want to replace some white guy with some white guy. But it'd be cooler to have a panel of. Of thoughtful people of different genders, of different ages, of different sexualities, whatever, to be able to, like, at least brainstorm, to give a collective of perspective, to help somebody make a decision.

John Larsen [03:17:47] I love it.

John Dehlin [03:17:48] Other than just ignoring his question and pretending it never. I never got it. So it'd be fun to have you back for that.

John Larsen [03:17:53] Sure, sure.

John Dehlin [03:17:54] Yeah. And, Kimmy, maybe you could join sometime. No, maybe not.

John Larsen [03:17:57] And I still want to come back and have us talk about Jesus. All right.

John Dehlin [03:18:00] Oh, yeah. So whenever you want, John Larsen, we'll have you back. Thanks for coming.

John Larsen [03:18:05] It's been a pleasure.

John Dehlin [03:18:06] Thanks for being a prophet in the wilderness. Carah, do you want to give. Give us the closeout. Do you want to tell our listeners anything you want to tell us to.

Carah Burrell [03:18:13] I was just thinking how you were talking to him, saying that he's, you know, this prophet in this suit. And last night my daughter asked me to show a picture of Santa Claus, and I was like, do I show a real picture of Santa Claus? I should have just looked at a picture of you because you are bringing gifts and presents that everyone is now more rich for having you. So this has been probably my favorite podcast ever.

John Larsen [03:18:37] Well, thanks. It's.

Carah Burrell [03:18:38] Christmas came early, so I'm trying to say.

John Dehlin [03:18:39] And what do you want to tell our listeners? Just to close out the final.

Carah Burrell [03:18:42] Oh, to close out. We just put up a video about Thrive Women's Books Conference is coming up October 2nd in the Provo Library. I will be hosting and we have a bunch of awesome speakers lined up. So if you what's the purpose of that post Mormon Women Thrive Conference? To facilitate healing and friendship and just be an awesome, safe, happy landing place to.

John Dehlin [03:19:01] No one's making any money, that's all.

Carah Burrell [03:19:03] Nope, it's. I'm, I'm volunteering. It's a nine to six day and there'll be social groups for making new friendships and fostering new relationships.

John Dehlin [03:19:13] And what's the website for that?

Carah Burrell [03:19:14] Thrivebeyondreligion.com and the price is. Price is about $25.

John Dehlin [03:19:19] We're about 60%. We're about 60% sold out.

John Larsen [03:19:22] I and I will endorse Thrive too. There's a lot of the stuff I don't get into, but I Thrive has done a lot of great work. I've heard a lot of great things. I've been there. I think it's well worth your time.

John Dehlin [03:19:32] Yeah. Okay. What else?

Closing Thoughts and Support for Mormon Stories

Carah Burrell [03:19:34] And yeah, so. Oh, I was just going to final say that I just put up a video yesterday on our Facebook Instagram YouTube channel where we sat down with the board of Thrive to discuss the Thrive women's event that's coming up. So if you're interested, go watch that. That's on all those different platforms. And then with TikTok, we just hit 50,000 followers of our Mormon Stories podcast. Of our Mormon Stories podcast channel. Slicing up things. We take down time, codes and notes right now. And I can't wait to edit this episode. I'm going to take like 25. People are going to get annoyed. They're going to think it's just the John Larsen Show. When I put this many clips on TikTok because I'm really excited. We have a lot of good discussions today. Anything else? What else am I missing?

John Dehlin [03:20:16] The My Mormon Story thing.

Carah Burrell [03:20:18] Oh yeah. And then me and John were me and John Dehlin, we're putting our heads together. We want to start as many different trends and ideas and ways to kind of stop the gatekeeping for getting guests on Mormon Stories. And it's just a fun idea to tell your story on TikTok in one minute or less. I'm sorry, I cheated. I did a 1:20 on mine because I have the three minute feature now on TikTok. So I'm going to use it and hashtagging it My Mormon Story, try to tell the most important points. And then after about what do we decide maybe a hundred of these on TikTok we'll go through and we want to select somebody to interview that told an interesting story. And just we have a lot, eight

John Dehlin [03:20:58] or 10 right now.

Carah Burrell [03:20:59] Yeah, so I made one under my Nuanceo name, under my Nuance oh account. And yeah, so we want to, yeah, we want to end the gatekeeping. We want to have as, facilitate as many conversations. TikTok is just a great way to do that. And so using that platform, integrating it with this Mormon Stories podcast platform in as many different ways as possible.

Carah Burrell [03:21:18] We've been doing that with, you know, responses to the givens and responses to Brad Wilcox and I think I can't. I don't know, John, if you have an opinion on this, but I really think that TikTok, since we started talking about it on Mormon Stories, the ex Mormon TikTok community is just exploding. So people need community. People have a lot to say and they're excited to start talking about it on TikTok. So we want to. Yeah, we want to meld these platforms with each other and be able to facilitate as much healing and growth and expression as we can in the ex Mormon world.

John Dehlin [03:21:47] All right. All right. And I'll just say, as always, we need your financial support. So donate. At MormonStories.org, click on the donate button button, to become a monthly donor. We're tax deductible in the US we're transparent in our finances, and we're just here to support the mission. And email us@moremorestoriesgmail.com comment, follow us like us on all the platforms, give us your ideas and suggestions and stay tuned for more Good stuff. So thanks again, John. You're awesome. Thank you. Thanks again, Carah. You're awesome.

Carah Burrell [03:22:15] Yeah, this was really, really fun.

John Dehlin [03:22:16] Thank you guys for having me. We'll see you guys soon. Take care, everybody.

Carah Burrell [03:22:19] Bye.

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