Mormon Mouse Memes – The Whole Truth
Joseph Smith
D&C 124 and the Mask of The Lord
In Doctrine and Covenants Section 124, verse 144 it reads:
“And a commandment I give unto you, that you should fill all these offices and approve of those names which I have mentioned, or else disapprove of them at my general conference;”
It’s a very curious statement and one I will return to. It appears in the second to last verse in the longest section of Doctrine and Covenants, a section in which The Lord speaks and commands on a wide variety of things, including the following:
- A calling to proclaim the gospel to every king in the world, the President of the United States, the governors of The United States, and every country in the world.
- A commandment to the “kings of the earth” to give gold and silver to The Church so it can build a temple.
- The Lord’s assignment to and endorsement of John C. Bennett (who later was discovered to be a fraud and a serious enemy of The Church).
- A commandment to build a boarding house called “Nauvoo House” that Joseph Smith and his descendants can live in forever.
- A commandment to build a new temple in Nauvoo.
- A teaser about the great, hidden things the Lord wants to reveal in the new temple.
- A warning that baptisms for the dead will not be acceptable outside of a temple after an unspecified “sufficient time” has been provided to build the temple.
- An ominous declaration by the Lord in verse 32 that “if you do not these things at the end of the appointment ye shall be rejected as a church, with your dead, saith the Lord your God.”
- A pardon for failing, due to persecution, to build a temple in Missouri.
- The Lord’s will that various named individuals (including Joseph Smith) purchase between $50 and $15,000 of stock in Nauvoo House in order to fund its construction.
- Messages from the Lord to various individuals instructing them in what they should do and promising them blessings for their obedience. Temple building, missionary work, family relocation, elements of a Nauvoo House business plan, and a new translation of The Bible are all mentioned by the Lord.
- Offices and callings in the priesthood and who should fill them and what they should do.
- Some particularly important and special counsel, commandments, and blessings for Hyrum Smith, William Law, and Sidney Rigdon, including giving the sealing power and the office of patriarch, prophet, seer, and revelator to Hyrum Smith, and giving the power to heal, cast out devils, and resist poison to William Law. Oh, and the Lord includes an extra, coy little aside for Law in verse 100, saying “And what if I will that he should raise the dead…”
God the Father seems to be the speaker throughout Section 124, due to the last phrase of verse 123, that reads “…which is after the order of mine Only Begotten Son.” However, at times it sounds like Jesus Christ is the speaker, due to references to “the day of my visitation” (verse 10), “Presidency of my Church” (verse 84), and ‘”my everlasting gospel” (verse 88) – all things typically named after or associated with The Son and not The Father. This fluidity with the Divine point of view occurs elsewhere in Doctrine and Covenants, such as in Section 109. verses 1-5 when Joseph Smith addresses God as if he were both Jesus Christ and God the Father, or Section 49 where The Father who speaks of “mine Only Begotten Son in verse 5 also says :”…I am Jesus Christ…” in verse 28.
The number of subjects and level of detail The Lord gets into (right down to the business details of stock purchases) is interesting and worthy of its own analysis and discussion. Some might say it’s a specificity of detail somewhat unbecoming for the Supreme Being, but of course there is precedent, and we find a similar fixation in The Old Testament, where The Holy One of Israel gets very specific about a whole spectrum of special rules pertaining to everything from animal sacrifice to monthly menstruation.
But the biggest curiosity almost seems to be hiding in plain sight from the more casual, or more faith-inclined reader. I myself never really noticed it or thought about it until now. Apart from the impressive list of subjects and details in this section, there is a record-scratch worthy moment in verse 144, the second to last of the section:
“And a commandment I give unto you, that you should fill all these offices and approve of those names which I have mentioned, or else disapprove of them at my general conference;” (emphasis added)
Say whaaat?
Is it just me, or did The Lord God just give a commandment to either approve or disapprove of his own revealed will?
If God gives the name of a person to serve in a specific role in His church, isn’t that a revelation from Him? Wouldn’t that make it his will that that person serve in that role? Or does God just give suggestions sometimes, take ’em or leave ’em? Even if he did, if you knew a name was from God, why in God’s name would you pick someone else?
If I counted correctly, between verses 123 and 142 God “mentions” forty-four names of individuals He wants to serve in specific roles in His church. While it’s very progressive of Him to be so democratic and teach the people to vote on things, wouldn’t commanding The Church to vote on these names in this case be a little like Einstein commanding some children to check his math? It’s almost as if God himself doesn’t know if the names he has given are the right names. And while a good argument could be made as to why The Lord might command His church to vote to approve revelation from Him, I don’t know why God would want His church to disapprove of revelation from Him, unless the revelation may not really be from Him after all, in which case He is not really the speaker in this section of Doctrine and Covenants.
But if God is not really speaking in Section 124 of Doctrine and Covenants, then who is? Well, it’s Joseph Smith, of course, dictating revelation in the first person singular voice as if he himself is God. It’s one of his personas. And it’s rather like the ancient Latin sense of that word, “persona,” which was a mask worn by an actor performing in an open-air theatre, a mask which was constructed in such a way as to amplify the sound of the actor’s voice so he could be better heard by the audience. When Joseph Smith is speaking as God, the mask of The Lord goes up, and often it’s such a convincing performance that one could be forgiven for forgetting that it’s just a mask. But once in a while, Joseph reminds us who is really speaking, by saying something completely out of character for an all-powerful master of the Universe.
The Book of Mormon Cutting Room Floor
What parts of the translation of The Book of Mormon were left out of the story? Couldn’t Joseph Smith and Olivery Cowdery have simply burned their notes and drafts when they were done with them? Just because people said he didn’t use notes or references, doesn’t mean he didn’t use notes or references, as we know from the lengthy King James Bible quotes, including translation errors specific to the 1769 edition, an edition which Joseph Smith would have had access to.
It is often ignored that Joseph Smith himself never said he didn’t use any notes or references, that he never said much about it at all but that he did it through the power of God. That could mean an awful lot of different things.
If Joseph didn’t always, but only sometimes or often produced the text of The Book of Mormon in the way that witnesses described, then their descriptions of the process could still be truthful, and even they themselves might not realize how much they left out in their descriptions, or if they did realize it, not give it much thought at all. I think human nature is often to focus on what is most interesting or important to the individual telling or hearing a story, to the exclusion of other potentialy important information.
If I am someone who smiles and laughs alot at work, then those who meet and work with me might describe me to other people as someone who is always smiling and laughing, when in fact they also spend quite a bit of time with me when I’m not smiling and laughing, but it doesn’t impress them enough to mention it. Me smiling and laughing makes it into their mental movie of our experiences. Everything else about me gets edited out onto the cutting room floor.
Three Truths for Mormons
Based on how I’m feeling at the moment, I would like to share with Mormons (and with members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President Nelson…) three truths that I’ve learned since I began studying church history, doctrine, and culture, as well as science, philosophy, and religion:
- There is no good evidence that anyone or anything exists yet that places specific thoughts or feelings in your mind or body other than you. Everyone should educate themselves on the latest and best science on the human brain, because we all have one and we are all nothing without it, so shouldn’t we understand it and take care of it well? As far as we know at this time, your thoughts and feelings are yours and yours alone, and they are a function of your body (especially your brain), which is a function of your DNA and your environment. This means that Satan has no way to tempt you and God has no way to inspire you, other than by acting on their own in objective reality. The correct answer to the age-old Mormon question “How do I know if it’s my own thoughts or The Holy Ghost?” is that it’s all you and it’s always all you. Personally I think this means that either God and Satan do not exist or that they do not exist in the form traditionally taught by The Church.
- There is no good reason for the gold plates to be withheld from the world. I think the two most popular explanations I’ve come across for why the rest of the world beyond the eleven witnesses cannot see Joseph Smith’s gold plates are these: that God wanted to protect The Book of Mormon from the kind of translation errors and worldly interference that are found in The Bible, and that God wants to test our faith. Neither of these explanations works in any kind of objectively true way. Even if the plates had ended up safe in a museum (which God could surely bring about, couldn’t he?), Joseph Smith still would have had first crack at a full translation, and if his translation was correct it would ultimately win out in the kind of world and culture we’ve lived in since 1830, thereby supporting and confirming his true prophetic calling from God. Also, if the plates were confirmed as an authentic historical artifact and were available for anyone to inspect in a museum, faith and conversion would increase, but faith would still be required to believe and know that the supernatural and miraculous events described on the plates were objectively real and actually occured. Knowing that the text of The Bible is authentically ancient has never removed the burden of faith from the believer as far as I know, and neither would it with The Book of Mormon. In other words, knowing with scientific proof that the ancient inhabitants of MesoAmerica actually recorded on gold plates that they had supernatural and miraculous experiences is different from whether they actually had those experiences that they claimed to have – faith is required either way, so God has no good reason that I know of to withold the plates from the world. However well-intentioned, withholding evidence like this is a classic technique of the magician and con artist. If Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life,” then shouldn’t we agree and remember that the truth does not withhold evidence of itself? Never trust that you have all of the truth from someone who won’t let you look at all of the evidence.
- Although he is all-knowing, God never says or does anything in the scriptures to indicate that he has any special knowledge or insight into why his children do what they do. The only reason he ever seems to give for their misbehavior is that they’ve misbehaved, they’ve sinned, they’ve chosen wrong because they’ve rejected the good and embraced the evil. Modern science and human experience tells us that in reality there can be a great variety of reasons that people do what they do, reasons over which they have little or no control, and that identifying and trying to work with those reasons seems to help bring about a rate of positive change that surely is as good and likely much better than simply commanding people to repent.
Dear President Nelson, 081722
To: President Russell M. Nelson, prophet, seer, and revelator of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
From: Mormon Mouse
Re: Which Part is God’s Part?
Dear President Nelson,
In working through a so called “faith crisis” over the last eight years, I often found myself asking “which part is God’s part?” There seem to be so many different faith-promoting stories and teachings in The Church where all of the physical work and materials and everything is provided by mortals and the natural world and it is unclear what if anything was actually provided by God and the supernatural world, other than perhaps a subjective feeling or belief that something was provided. This seems to conflict with the scriptures, where God is depicted as regularly acting, intervening, and providing in the natural world.
Take baptisms for the dead, for example. If I remember right, The Church has this unique and special ordinance because of a single verse in The New Testament and the teachings and revelations of Joseph Smith.
But, how can God be all-powerful if he needs his children in The Church in the mortal world to do the work of salvation for his children in the immortal world over which he himself presumably would have direct and perfect control and stewardship? If God is not able to do his own work in his own world with his own resources, if he needs us and our natural world, and if we have free agency and can tell him no, then wouldn’t God be subservient to us and our natural world in some way? How does the creator of intelligent, free-agent children have all power if he needs their cooperation in order to do what he wants?
Priesthood blessings are another example. If a faithful sick person receives a blessing of healing from a righteous priesthood holder and then they receive medical treatment, and then they recover, which part is God’s part? And if you removed the faith, the priesthood blessing, and belief in God from that scenario, but you kept the sick person and the medical treatment, wouldn’t the sick person still recover?
I am not trying to be difficult or be like one of those Book of Mormon Antichrists or anything like that. I am sincerely interested in your thoughts on this matter and will give careful and polite consideration to any answers you might be kind enough to provide to the five questions in this letter.
Sincerely,
Mormon Mouse
If God Really Wants Us All Back
I can’t help but think that if The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true and God really wants us all back, then he would have called prophets and apostles, revealed scripture, and established and maintained his church in all areas of the world from the beginning.
If the original church of Jesus Christ truly did become corrupt and lose its priesthood authority by the time the original apostles died, then the only good reason I can think of to wait until 1800’s upstate New York to restore it all through Joseph Smith is if it was Joseph Smith’s restoration and not God’s.
If the church’s apostasy and restoration claims are true, then wouldn’t that mean that the all-powerful creator of the universe allowed mere mortals to corrupt his church and lose his priesthood authority, forcing a pause on his plan of salvation for almost one thousand eight-hundred years of human history because God couldn’t get anyone else to fix it besides Joseph Smith? I think Joseph was a brilliant, strong, and unique person, but (if the rest of the church is true), I don’t think he was the only one in billions and billions of God’s children hanging around in heaven who could write scripture and establish and lead a church. In fact, if God truly is making miracles through mortals which could never happen on their own, then by definition Joseph Smith could not be the only one through whom the restoration of the gospel could come to pass, because it purportedly came to pass through God’s miraculous help and not man’s ability! If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, and a god of miracles, then can’t he by definition cause a restoration to come to pass (if it was ever really needed) through anyone he chooses, at any time he chooses, and for any reason he chooses, not only through Joseph Smith? If so, why did he wait until Joseph Smith was born? And why did he restore it in only one (relatively) very small part of the world instead of in all parts of the world equally, if he truly loves us all equally?
Yes, we can try to excuse God’s 1,800 year sabbatical with the assertion that a thousand years on earth is one day to God (2 Peter 3:8, The Pearl of Great Price, Facsimile 2, Explanation, Fig. 1), but that old excuse seems to make people forget that we’re not talking about something that happened to an eternal being like God on a planet like Kolob, we’re talking about something that happened on planet Earth to our fellow human beings. Good for God if 1,800 years almost gets him through his weekend, but down here on Earth it’s a hell of a long time to us mere mortals and God would know that and he would know the effect that has on us.
We can also blame the so-called “Great Apostasy” on “free agency” and we can blame it on the temptations of Satan and the 1/3 of the host of heaven who followed after him, but if no matter what goes wrong we are always blaming everyone and everything besides God, then how can we can ever truly know the objective truth about him? God must be falsifiable in order to know if he is objectively real, because how meaningful is the objective truth, really, if it’s true no matter what the evidence indicates?
Sometimes I feel like the church leaders don’t think much of God and they don’t even realize it. They’ve thought up a God who is all-powerful, but who doesn’t do anything objectively real without human beings and the laws of physics doing it for him. They’ve thought up a God who is the master designer of the universe and everything in it, but who for thousands of years seems unable to work with his children in such a way as to establish his church and keep it going until Joseph Smith finally saves the day. They’ve thought up a God who only performs truly miraculous miracles in a way we can’t really check and in a past which we can’t really inspect, but who hasn’t left any good evidence of those miracles behind in objective reality.
The problem isn’t that the God of the Abrahamic religions isn’t real, it’s that so far he is only subjectively real but is believed and taught to be objectively real. He is only subjectively real so far because all of the strongest evidence for him is subjective, such as personal thoughts and feelings. And as long as all of the strongest evidence for him is subjective, there will continue to be a wide variety of conflicting beliefs about him if a wide variety of subjects are seeking him. Subjective evidence fuels the flames of religious conviction and leads to subjective truth (I know God has spoken to me), objective evidence reveals the true nature of objective reality and leads to objective truth (gravity keeps me on the ground). We humans seem to suffer from a sort of subjective-objective conclusion confusion, which creates illusions and delusions we will not overcome if we are not able to update our conclusions in the face of new and better evidence.
I believe that gravity is a true “theory,” but if everything around me started floating away I would question it. The way that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to teach some of their “truths,” it’s as if they wouldn’t question gravity even if everything was always in the air.
Email to Our Ward Missionaries – My Mormon Story, Condensed
(I posted the following to r/exmormon reddit on 12-28-21:)
Earlier this week our ward missionaries left me a voicemail saying they hoped we had a Merry Christmas and that they’d like to come by and introduce themselves and share a spiritual thought with us. I sent them a text in response saying we have COVID at our house right now but that I would send them an email in the next day or so to explain a little about our current situation in regards to the church.
In case any of you find this interesting or useful in some way, here is the text of the email I sent them today (with the subject line “My Mormon Story, Condensed”). Since religion is their full-time job I felt it would be okay to go into some detail, but for a different audience I would probably shorten this down to a few sentences or a paragraph:
Dear Elder_____ and Elder _____,
Greetings and Salutations,
Thanks again for your voicemail yesterday and for reaching out. Hopefully you got my text response last night. I do want to point out that on the voicemail you said you wanted to introduce yourselves, and I believe we already met when you stopped by our house awhile back – not sure if you forgot that you met us already or if it was just a figure of speech.
I’ve been debating about the best way to respond to you, and decided it felt best to write an email to give you some details about our history and current situation in regards to the church so you can have the information you need to decide if it’s worth continuing to reach out to us or not. I enjoy writing, and I especially enjoy writing about religion, science, and philosophy, but I will try to be relatively concise and not go on for twenty pages or anything like that, even though part of me wants to.
Where to begin?
I’ll start with a simple statement to explain why we haven’t been to church (Zoom or in-person) for over a year and half:
Our beliefs have changed, and we don’t feel like we can be ourselves at church anymore without making conservative, faithful members feel uncomfortable or offended, and without risking being demoted to second class citizens.
I think my wife _____ and my kids _____ and _____ would all agree with that statement, and now I’ll add some more details but will speak mostly just for myself, even though they may also agree with some or all of the rest of the things I write:
I’m a lifelong member of the church. Everyone on my dad’s side of the family is a member and we have pioneer roots back to John D. Lee. I graduated from early-morning seminary, served a Spanish speaking mission in Boston (1999-2000), got married and sealed to my high school sweetheart _____ in the temple in 2002, and have had a variety of callings and experiences serving in the church since then.
I’ve always been uncomfortable with some aspects of being a member of the church, even back to when I was a little kid, but I always assumed I should just go along with it all because it was obviously all just as factually true as parents, teachers, and leaders had taught. In 2014 there were a few things that happened in my life that caused me to question the church in a way that I never had before, including my experience watching the series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I learned some things about science that I’d never heard and/or never paid much attention to before, and I had the thought “I wonder how all this science stuff squares with the church’s doctrine?” I looked things up on the internet about the church that I’d never looked up before, and so, just before my 36th birthday, I slowly began to learn that the church’s doctrine, history, and culture is not what I thought and not what I was taught. I went down a rabbit-hole that turned into hundreds and maybe thousands of hours of research – books, articles, websites, podcasts, and videos exploring both faithful and critical perspectives on the church (much of it from the church’s own materials, including the scriptures), as well as a lot of world religion, science, and philosophy stuff and over time as I found ways to rationalize all of the problems and continue to be faithful only to eventually revert back to a more scientific approach, I came to some important conclusions, and I’ll share just a few of them:
- The church is true after all, but only subjectively. Objectively, it is not what it claims to be. In other words the church is true when you believe it’s true, but it isn’t true on its own. If a person truly believes something is true they tend to have much the same experience that they would have if it really was true, even if it’s not true. It’s fine to seek after and enjoy living a life and a religion based around subjective truths if it helps you to be a better person, but when thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and personal experiences are presented as objective facts that is where the conflicts begin, especially when it leads to the oppression of minorities and vulnerable individuals and groups who don’t fit in.
- Never trust that you have the whole truth from someone who won’t let you look at all of the evidence. For example, the reason Joseph had to give the gold plates back to Moroni is because there were no gold plates in objective reality, or if there were, they couldn’t pass critical inspection. But, if you truly believe and have faith that there were gold plates then you end up having much the same experience as you would if there really were gold plates. The experiences of the three and eight witnesses are far more complicated and much more subjective than the church has a history of teaching. And, once I served on a jury and watched enough true crime documentaries to realize how many people have been wrongly convicted on eyewitness testimony, I realized eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable in establishing the objective facts, even in the one true church.
- I don’t believe in an embodied God who kills. Even if I’m wrong and this killing God is real, I wouldn’t want to worship him. It doesn’t make sense to me that a loving, immortal Father who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good would ever kill one of his children for any reason (especially innocent people, especially innocent women and children), particularly now that I’ve gained a better understanding of the natural world and how it works on its own. It does make sense that human beings would create a God who does this though. It’s ironic that 3 Nephi Chapters 8-10 come right before the chapter that I used to go around trying to get people to read on my mission. At the time I never thought very carefully about what’s really going on in those chapters, and don’t remember it ever bothering me before. I now see them much differently. If I had to blame losing my “testimony” on one thing and one thing only, I might choose 3 Nephi 8-10. I’m also now greatly troubled by a variety of other scriptures in the Book of Mormon (and other books of scripture as well of course) including 1 Nephi 4, Alma 14-15, and Helaman 7-11. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I do believe in “God” by the way, I just believe something very different from what the church teaches.
- The church does a lot of good and it really works for some people, but it also does a lot of harm and doesn’t really work for other people, and that should be acknowledged and accepted by both the faithful and the critics.
Elders, there are hundreds of other things I would enjoy going into as well, but this is probably already too long for an unsolicited email, and so the question becomes, is it a good use of your time to visit with us and share spiritual thoughts? I would only enjoy it if I felt like I could express myself fully and freely (and politely of course), and it would most likely always turn into the kind of friendly but time-consuming debate that I don’t think the church wants its missionaries spending a lot of time on. Also, my wife and kids aren’t interested in having churchy missionary visits right now.
If you need someone to help you out of the church then I am your guy and we are your family. If you need someone to help you in temporal ways, we are nice people and would be glad to help. If you need someone to be a real friend on a human level, with no church strings attached, then we could probably help with that. But if your ultimate goal on your mission is to reactivate and baptize people through teaching and service, then you will be wasting your time with us. Maybe that will change someday, but at the moment, I doubt it. I would need some really good objective evidence that the church is true, and I’ve been looking for a long time and I’m still looking and I still haven’t found any, although there is a mountain of subjective evidence. By the way, back in 2013 I set a goal to read all of the general conference talks given in my lifetime and I am still working on it, and I hope that tells you something positive about who I am and where I am coming from with all of this. I am currently working on April 2013 conference and am excited to finish this monumental reading project. I’ve read well over 2,000 talks so far. I still love reading, writing, and thinking about the church.
I’m not going to be the guy who says don’t contact us, because it’s not in my nature, and I will always try to be nice when you or anyone does contact us, but in response to your message I felt you should know more about where we’re coming from to help you decide how best to spend your time.
Good luck with your missions, and I really do wish you the best!
Mormon Mouse
The Hard Problem of Heavenly Mother
One of the biggest problems with the Mormon concept of Heavenly Mother is that if she is real then most likely one of two things would be true: either there is more than one of her, or polygamy in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wasn’t divinely sanctioned after all.
If polygamy was ever a principle that was inspired, revealed, or commanded by God as a way of bringing his children back into his presence in the highest level of the celestial kingdom, then God himself would need to practice polygamy as well. Otherwise, some of his male children would have more wives than him in the celestial kingdom.
If God isn’t a polygamist but polygamy was divinely sanctioned, then Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the rest of the early Mormon polygamists and even modern eternal polygamists such as Russell M. Nelson and Dallin H. Oaks will all have more wives than God in heaven. They will have more wives than everyone else who wasn’t or isn’t a polygamist as well.
So, as the church continues to slowly incorporate more of Heavenly Mother into their mainstream doctrine and culture as they seem to be doing, perhaps the members could in good conscience begin to ask the leaders of the church which Heavenly Mother they are referring to, or whether Joseph Smith made up the whole polygamy thing on his own.
In other words, if the church wants to teach Heavenly Mother, then they should also teach that there is more than one Heavenly Mother, or they should finally renounce their polygamous history and doctrines once and for all.
The Whole Truth
Never trust that you have the whole truth from someone who won’t let you look at all of the evidence.
In the case of Joseph Smith and the gold plates, his claim that he gave them back to the angel Moroni smells of deceit. When I had my faithful Mormon hat on, I accepted his claim without a second thought really. Of course he had to give them back to the angel Moroni because God didn’t want the world to mess The Book of Mormon up like it messed up the Bible, right? Now that I have my skeptic’s hat on I’ve realized that an intentional withholding of the very evidence that would validate your claim is a classic characteristic of con artists and magicians. Grant Palmer helped me realize that Joseph Smith believed the ends justify the means when you’re bringing people to Christ. The faithful might say that God withholds evidence to test our faith, but that doesn’t work in the case of The Book of Mormon (if ever). Why? Because even with a historically authenticated set of gold plates in a museum, it would still require faith to believe that the supernatural events that the plates describe actually happened and aren’t just ancient stories.
Mormon Mouse 