transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I am your co-host for today, John Dehlin, and today we have in studio someone we don't normally have in studio. Nemo.
Speaker 2:
[00:11] Hi, everyone.
Speaker 1:
[00:12] What the freak are you doing here?
Speaker 2:
[00:14] I'm just having a good time.
Speaker 1:
[00:15] Nemo's in the house, everyone. He's visiting from the UK. And it's good to have you, Nemo.
Speaker 2:
[00:21] Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm really excited about this guest.
Speaker 1:
[00:24] And you don't just come to visit, you bring a guest.
Speaker 2:
[00:28] Yeah, I bring treats for everyone when I visit from abroad.
Speaker 1:
[00:32] For those of you who don't know, for the three of you who don't know, Nemo is the head, the face, the voice, the brain behind the Nemo the Mormon YouTube channel. So check it out, support it, subscribe and like to it as you subscribe and like to this Mormon Stories Podcast as well. Nemo, how do you want to begin today's episode?
Speaker 2:
[00:54] Well, I'm really excited about this guest because we have someone who has experienced Mormonism a lot but has not had a chance to resit down with the ex-Mormon community and have a chat with us about our experience. So he's someone I've had a chance to sit down and talk with about his experience of reading the Book of Mormon and about his experience of going on a cruise with a bunch of influencers, but we'll get to all that because I think we should let him introduce himself.
Speaker 1:
[01:19] Okay, who are you, brother?
Speaker 3:
[01:23] John, thanks so much for having me. My name is Jared Smith. I'm the guy behind the Heliocentric YouTube channel, and I have a series on there called Atheist Church Audit.
Speaker 1:
[01:34] And yeah, so you will be talking about this, but you're a former Christian who became an atheist, and now you have a YouTube channel where as an atheist, you check out churches.
Speaker 3:
[01:47] Yeah, yeah. So my background is that I'm an atheist with a couple of degrees in theology.
Speaker 1:
[01:53] What are they?
Speaker 3:
[01:54] Well, so my first degree in theology was a non-accredited degree in practical ministry from a little Pentecostal pseudo seminary called Fire School of Ministry out there in Charlotte, North Carolina. And then my second degree, I like to say that I got a degree in Christian heavy metal music at Wheaton College, because I studied theology, ancient languages and digital audio engineering, focusing on the conversation between Christianity, Judaism and Islam, culminating in an album called Ishmael. So it was an 11-song metal album that got me my degree at Wheaton College.
Speaker 1:
[02:31] And Mormons tend to be a little bit insular sometimes, so they won't know what, maybe many won't, and I hope I'm not underestimating you, dear viewers and audience members, but many may not know how, what Wheaton College means in a broader evangelical Christian context.
Speaker 3:
[02:50] Yeah, yeah. I mean, so Wheaton College, we liked to call ourselves the Harvard of Christian Institutions, which is probably a little generous, but it was still like, maybe not the BYU of Christian schools, but one of the premier evangelical institutions.
Speaker 1:
[03:10] Is it in Illinois?
Speaker 3:
[03:11] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[03:11] Wheaton, Illinois? Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[03:12] I had a blast there. It was a really good time.
Speaker 1:
[03:15] And you joked about, and we'll talk about this, but you associated Billy Graham with Wheaton?
Speaker 3:
[03:21] Yeah. So Billy Graham is Wheaton College's most famous alumnus.
Speaker 1:
[03:26] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[03:26] And so one of the biggest buildings on campus there is the Billy Graham Center. It's funny because he's kind of the old school evangelical, and probably most of the staff and faculty there don't quite align with that flavor of evangelicalism anymore, but he's still part of our legacy, and so, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[03:47] So part of today will be your story. Part of today will be how an ex-Christian atheist experiences Mormonism in the modern day. So part of today will be your story. Part of today will be how an ex-Christian atheist encounters Mormonism, and maybe, sprinkled throughout, you can ask me Nemo questions about Mormonism and or ex-Mormonism, and we can just have a fun chat. 100%.
Speaker 3:
[04:21] Yeah, I mean, the short and sweet of it is that I don't think I've ever been more confused and perplexed by a religious denomination or sect before. I don't mean sect with any sort of negative connotation, but yeah, like, I'm fascinated by this whole world, and it's been such a, like, honor and a privilege kind of getting to be an outsider looking in and experiencing this whole complicated world. And so yeah, I'm just, I'm grateful.
Speaker 1:
[04:51] Tell us some of the churches or religions that you've scrutinized or observed so far.
Speaker 3:
[04:57] Yeah, yeah. So my whole shtick with Atheist Church Audit, what I love to do is I love to go and experience religions. I love to go and, you know, see them in the flesh, because it's kind of too easy, especially nowadays with short-form content, to just, you know, hey, let me clip farm all of the worst moments of the Mormon faith or, you know, Scientology or any of these groups and just have a never-ending conveyor belt of like awful things that people have said, right? I think it's much more honest and much more difficult to go in person and visit these places and hear them out and see them face-to-face. So one of my modus operandi is that I like to go in blind, usually. I don't like to Google churches before I go and visit them. I don't want to know about their, you know, big scandals before I go and, you know, sit down and have a chat with them. I want to go and experience it as a total novice, right? As, you know, an earnest person seeking wood. So I think that's super important for me.
Speaker 1:
[06:01] So sounds super lazy. No, I'm just joking.
Speaker 3:
[06:04] Sometimes it is, not gonna lie.
Speaker 1:
[06:06] Or sustainable is another way to say it.
Speaker 3:
[06:08] I mean, you know, candidly, sometimes it is just like throwing a dart on the map and being like, yeah, I don't know, this place looks interesting. Then have stumbled into some really weird churches through doing that, right?
Speaker 2:
[06:19] What's the strangest one you've stumbled into?
Speaker 3:
[06:21] Oh man, I mean, I think that the United House of Prayer for All People is probably gotta be up there. So it is a small denomination with about 100 congregations in the US. And their leader is affectionately known by all of its adherents as sweet daddy. And so they sing hymns to him every time he walks into a room. There are virgins in white dresses literally fanning him with big fans. When he enters a room, standard protocol is that you reach in your wallet and pull out crisp dollar bills for him to come and snatch from the audience. I mean, this is like a real church that's here in America. And just nobody knows about it.
Speaker 1:
[07:07] Where is it based?
Speaker 3:
[07:08] So their headquarters is in Washington, DC., but then they've got churches kind of scattered throughout the US.
Speaker 1:
[07:14] Is it Christian?
Speaker 3:
[07:15] Yeah, yeah, it's Christian. It's a black denomination that was started in the early 1900s. And for whatever reason, they've just never gotten much media attention. Sweet Daddy, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[07:29] Church of?
Speaker 3:
[07:31] The United House of Prayer for All People. That's their full name.
Speaker 1:
[07:33] Whoa, okay.
Speaker 3:
[07:35] That's wild.
Speaker 1:
[07:35] And just do like five or ten of the other churches or religions you've...
Speaker 3:
[07:40] Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I've done... I've been to pretty much every major Christian denomination. You know, I've visited the Catholics. I've done a Pascha service with the Eastern Orthodox. I just got back from two weeks in Egypt exploring Coptic Christianity, Presbyterians, Methodists, Armenians, Calvinists. One of the other groups that I've been pretty critical of has been the Jehovah's Witnesses. So I've got a lot of Jehovah's Witness friends and supporters, and they've been one of the few groups that I've seen just kind of unilateral harm, right? Not like, not 100%, right? But I tend to be probably more gracious than the average atheist, which occasionally is like a valid criticism of my work. But in the case of Jehovah's Witnesses, just like going and experiencing them was so off-putting and kind of scary for me at times. Just like, you know, the disfellowshipping arrangement, the blood doctrine, they don't allow blood transfusions and-
Speaker 1:
[08:51] Didn't that just change?
Speaker 3:
[08:53] It was softened recently. I don't want to misstate it, but from what I understand, as of like 10 minutes ago, they are now allowed to preserve their own blood for a blood transfusion with themselves. But if you're in a car wreck, from what I'm pretty sure that the protocol is still, you are expected to bleed out if you need a blood transfusion. They carry like cards on them, like medical cards that say, I am a Jehovah's Witness. If I am in need of blood, I reject it. And I mean, it's heartbreaking.
Speaker 1:
[09:27] Baby steps, brother, baby steps.
Speaker 3:
[09:29] So I'm very excited about this slight improvements.
Speaker 1:
[09:34] We know a lot about slight improvements.
Speaker 2:
[09:37] Yeah, very experienced with baby steps.
Speaker 1:
[09:39] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[09:40] Baby steps that fall over sometimes and then get back up further back than they were.
Speaker 1:
[09:45] In fact, we have a big announcement to make to you, Jared. Women can now be presidents of the Sunday School in Mormonism.
Speaker 3:
[09:52] Let's go.
Speaker 1:
[09:53] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[09:53] All about it. Man, what an upgrade.
Speaker 2:
[09:56] And at exactly the same time they did it, they then made Sunday School shorter. I think it's a coincidence. It must be.
Speaker 1:
[10:06] Anyway.
Speaker 3:
[10:06] Oh man, that's, that's cool.
Speaker 1:
[10:08] Well, I want to have a, I want to hear your assessment of Mormons versus Joe's Witness, who does more harm, but not now.
Speaker 3:
[10:14] Sure.
Speaker 1:
[10:15] Not now. Maybe, maybe that can be something we cover a little bit later. Okay. Any other cults? Like have you done Scientology or, you know?
Speaker 3:
[10:22] Candidly. So there's a lot of cults that I want to investigate soon, but I'm still waiting for kind of more support and funding, candidly, to have a legal team behind me, because a lot of the cults that I'm starting to slowly investigate, they're too litigious for me to like safely investigate in the way that I want to.
Speaker 1:
[10:42] That's one of the things about the Mormon Church, they don't sue you.
Speaker 2:
[10:48] No, they don't.
Speaker 3:
[10:49] Thoughts and prayers, John.
Speaker 1:
[10:51] I actually haven't been sued by the church yet. I've just been threatened with the lawsuit.
Speaker 2:
[10:56] Put on notice.
Speaker 3:
[10:56] I see.
Speaker 1:
[10:57] I've done two full days of mediation to avoid being sued.
Speaker 3:
[11:00] I see. Well, all the best, man.
Speaker 1:
[11:04] Thanks. No, we're less, for sure, less litigious in terms of suing people than Scientologists, and Jehovah's Witnesses.
Speaker 3:
[11:11] Yeah. I mean, I will say.
Speaker 1:
[11:13] So far. I mean, it could change.
Speaker 3:
[11:14] Yeah. So far.
Speaker 1:
[11:15] Keep going. Sorry.
Speaker 3:
[11:16] No, I mean, I'm just, I'm very grateful that, like, you know, that hasn't been an issue, thankfully, with the Jehovah's Witnesses. Yeah. Maybe the only other group that I think is worth mentioning is probably the group surrounding Apostle Catherine Crick out in California, in Los Angeles, the birthplace of the Four Square Movement. There's an Apostle out there who I've seen some really concerning stuff from. I saw her live and in person, and her congregation really emphasizes and prioritizes exorcisms and miracles, which usually results in, you know, contorting and, you know, seizing on the ground and screaming hysterically. It's really scary seeing that in person.
Speaker 2:
[12:03] Is she the one that calls you out? She's the one that calls you out personally?
Speaker 3:
[12:06] Yeah. So it was kind of bizarre being there because I just kind of showed up on a random Sunday. I caught wind of like, hey, there's this group that you should go and check out. So I show up for a normal Sunday morning. And I don't think that she knew who I was. But I was just standing there in the service, and I was probably the only person there who, you know, wasn't, you know, arms raised, eyes closed, caught up in the spirit. And she starts kind of doing, like, cold reads from stage and starts, you know, prophesying over people and, you know, she's pointing out people and she is immediately drawn to me because I'm the only one there, just kind of like looking around, you know, just observing. And she goes, you, you're just so misunderstood. And it seems like there was a baked in level of irony. Yes.
Speaker 2:
[13:03] Do you feel misunderstood, Jared?
Speaker 3:
[13:05] Well, clearly by her because she didn't know that I was there to audit her church.
Speaker 2:
[13:08] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[13:09] So very fun.
Speaker 1:
[13:11] Well, let's jump into your story. So tell us a bit about your Christian upbringing, assuming you had one.
Speaker 3:
[13:17] Yeah, yeah, I did. So, you know, my parents raised me kind of lightly Pentecostal, I would say.
Speaker 1:
[13:24] In North Carolina?
Speaker 3:
[13:25] Yeah, in North Carolina, kind of between Charlotte and Greensboro out in the sticks. You know, I was not a country boy, but, you know, raised adjacent to the country. Like, I think in the small Pentecostal church that I grew up in, I was the only kid in my youth group to not get pregnant or impregnate somebody out of wedlock.
Speaker 1:
[13:49] Wow.
Speaker 3:
[13:50] So really bizarre and unique experience.
Speaker 1:
[13:54] What's, how do you account for that fertility rate of your kids?
Speaker 3:
[13:59] Uh, poor sex education and living in a rural community, I would say. You know, it's just, it was just kind of how people did things, you know, for better or worse, it was pretty sad.
Speaker 1:
[14:10] So would you say your home was highly religious?
Speaker 3:
[14:15] Yeah, I would say so. And maybe I have to remind myself, like, how religious it was. It was weird, right? So I had my big come-to-Jesus moment when I was 13 and just immediately went headlong into it, right? Um, and I think there was an element of it where I was always kind of running from something. I was running from nihilism. I was running from atheism. And I think that thrust me headlong into the arms of Jesus. And so, you know, immediately I began cultivating a relationship with the Holy Spirit, um, you know, developed a testimony, as you guys would say. Uh, and, and then, um, also got really into theology, apologetics, um, studying the early church.
Speaker 1:
[15:03] Did your, uh, commitment to the Pentecostal faith begin with speaking in tongues, sort of confessional or whatever it's called?
Speaker 3:
[15:13] It's so funny, right? Because historically the Pentecostals really emphasized speaking in tongues. I feel like that's kind of been, um, belittled over the past 50 years or so. Um, maybe even shorter than that, maybe the past 30, where now kind of like the gifts of the spirit in general account for much more than just speaking in tongues. Um, and so, yeah, I, I, you know, I, I think I tried it and it was like, ah, I just don't think this is my thing. I never really had much of a consistent era where I was consistently speaking in tongues.
Speaker 1:
[15:49] So that wasn't a rite of passage for your Pentecostal upbringing?
Speaker 3:
[15:54] No, not for mine specifically.
Speaker 1:
[15:56] Um, what about like an altar call kind of being saved moment at the altar? Is that stereotypical?
Speaker 3:
[16:04] No. So I was, uh, uh, can I swear on the show?
Speaker 1:
[16:08] Yeah, sure.
Speaker 3:
[16:09] Cool. Um, so I was, uh, at a Christmas party in 2007 and, uh, I was starting to talk to my older brother who was, you know, off at ECU studying religion and philosophy.
Speaker 1:
[16:19] Eastern Carolina.
Speaker 3:
[16:20] Eastern Carolina University. Yeah. Big party school. And so, you know, I idolized him cause he was 10 years older than me and we were talking to this Christmas party and he's just kind of like casually like that, that Christianity stuff, you know, that's bullshit, right? And something about like what he was saying to me just like broke something inside of me. And I just, I interrupted him in the middle of a sentence and like sprinted to my mom's minivan, locked myself inside and just started like heaving and sobbing and like the thought of my worldview being like upended like that, even though it was a worldview that I really didn't care about, right? I didn't give a crap about religion at 13, but then all of a sudden at the prospect of having it taken away from me, it was like, I need this. I really need this to be real.
Speaker 1:
[17:06] And backfire effect for the wind.
Speaker 3:
[17:08] Yeah, yeah, truly. And so, I mean, from there, I was trying to find my epistemological and spiritual footing and grounding, trying to, you know, figure out what I believe, but also really, really wanting Christianity to be true, because I thought it was beautiful. And so, you know, by the end of high school, I was a chaplain, I was a worship leader. I eventually, like, shortly after, became a street preacher for a little while. You know, was standing on park benches, you know, pontificating about the love of God and imploring people to come and, you know, know the Savior and, and that was my whole world, man. Yeah, I, in high school, I was my ritual daily to wake up at 5 a.m. and have an hour of just, like, divine contemplation and, you know, adoring Christ and reading the scriptures and, you know, dancing with the Holy Spirit around my bedroom. That was, that was my whole world.
Speaker 2:
[18:09] I think that would have been more fun than seminary. I think, I wish I'd done that.
Speaker 1:
[18:13] I mean, we had good dances. I don't know about you, but not around our bed.
Speaker 2:
[18:17] Yeah, we had good dances. Yeah, like youth social dances, like you'll go to an LDS meeting house and a bunch of the young people will be there and there's like, they'll get a DJ and also want to play some music. It's all clean music. It's all Mormon appropriate music.
Speaker 3:
[18:30] Do they allow like slow dancing?
Speaker 2:
[18:32] Yeah, there's slow dancing involved. There's lion dancing, a big thing as well.
Speaker 3:
[18:36] Scandalous.
Speaker 1:
[18:36] No, no, we had, I grew up in the 80s and we had incredible dances with hundreds of youth dancing to Michael Jackson and, you know, Howard Jones.
Speaker 3:
[18:46] Awesome.
Speaker 2:
[18:47] It was a good time.
Speaker 1:
[18:47] Yeah, dancing has not been prohibited at all in my Mormon experience.
Speaker 3:
[18:52] Love to hear that.
Speaker 1:
[18:53] I mean, we created the Osmonds, right?
Speaker 3:
[18:56] Right, right.
Speaker 1:
[18:57] Maybe they're too old for you to know.
Speaker 3:
[18:58] Jehovah's Witnesses created Michael Jackson, so...
Speaker 1:
[19:01] Sort of, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Yeah, exactly. And I don't think Jehovah's Witnesses are supposed to dance.
Speaker 3:
[19:07] I don't know. It doesn't sound like the kind of thing that they would like, but I'll abstain from giving a definitive answer on that one.
Speaker 1:
[19:15] Celebrities get a pass in many high-demand religions.
Speaker 2:
[19:18] In many places.
Speaker 1:
[19:20] Anyway, so you were dancing around in your bed. So what were kind of the pillars of your... So it sounds like reading the Bible, praying, testifying. What were some of the pillars of your Christian upbringing, theologically, behaviorally, doctrinally?
Speaker 3:
[19:39] That's such an interesting way to phrase it. I mean, I think that, you know, having an intimacy with the Holy Spirit was kind of everything to me.
Speaker 1:
[19:46] It's meant what? If you have feelings?
Speaker 3:
[19:48] Yeah, I mean, you know, a deep and immediate sense of, you know, the reality of God with me, right? Not just kind of like an abstract theological statement of like, oh, I believe that, you know, God is up in the heavens and he hears our prayers, but like, no, God is here. He's like a dove resting on my shoulder, right? I mean, it was very intimate, like it was very spiritually intimate. So that was a huge thing.
Speaker 1:
[20:15] When you had a decision to make, would you be asking God?
Speaker 3:
[20:18] Oh, I would ask God what color shirt I should pick in the morning. You know, like everything was consulting him in prayer.
Speaker 2:
[20:25] It's like a codependent relationship with God.
Speaker 3:
[20:27] Yeah, I would say so. No, and that's a great way to put it. And candidly, I would say that like, that's maybe one of the hardest things about my deconversion is being frustrated with the sense of like, oh man, maybe there's not a right answer to every single little decision I have to make. That feels like a greater responsibility in some sense.
Speaker 2:
[20:53] Because you lose a level of certainty.
Speaker 3:
[20:55] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[20:55] That comes with that.
Speaker 3:
[20:57] Yeah, I can't outsource it.
Speaker 2:
[21:00] No.
Speaker 3:
[21:00] You know, I have to take responsibility if I, you know, wear the wrong color shirt. Yeah, yeah, sometimes you just miss it.
Speaker 2:
[21:09] Exactly, and then the outfit's ruined and then, you know, that's on you.
Speaker 3:
[21:12] Yeah, and, you know, my date doesn't like my pastel-colored shirt. She was hoping for something, you know, darker, and because of that, I don't get to meet my God-ordained wife.
Speaker 2:
[21:22] Well, this is the thing we joke, right? But actually, we can convince ourselves that these very small decisions can also be the thing that meant that we didn't get what we were meant to get in these massive ways. And so that can lead to this more scrupulosity-inducing praying to God about every single decision. Yeah, because, well, if I get one of these little decisions wrong, then I might not meet the woman I'm meant to marry, or I might get in the car at the wrong time, and then I might get in an accident. Whereas if I'd not got in the car at that time, I would have been fine, you know.
Speaker 3:
[21:48] Right.
Speaker 2:
[21:49] Hindsight allows us to look back and say, well, because I did this, I then avoided that. But we can never actually know. The idea of an omnipotent God allows people to believe that because he could know, he can guide you to avoid those things.
Speaker 3:
[21:59] For sure, for sure.
Speaker 2:
[22:03] So the relationship you had with God, as you've described it, because we've talked about this, sounds a lot more intimate of a relationship sometimes than I think what we find in Mormonism.
Speaker 3:
[22:14] That's, oh, man, we're diving in deep fast. I'm so here for it. I think that is one of my kind of biggest and looming questions and maybe soft criticisms for Mormonism that I have so far, is I'm still intrigued by the place of Jesus within Mormonism versus the place of Jesus within Nicene Christianity. And within that, there's different variations and permutations of that. But I think there's still kind of like a distinct flavor between the two that I'm interested in.
Speaker 1:
[22:48] How is it for you? We'll put a pin in that and definitely address that a little bit later, but I don't want to lose the mojo of your story. What did Jesus in your life mean for you at the time, in your teens? Because you mentioned God being on your shoulders, so to speak. Were God and Jesus the same thing to you? Or is there a difference?
Speaker 3:
[23:10] I mean, yes and no, right? Because that gets into Trinitarian orthodoxy. And so you kind of, you know, you're a heretic if you say yes, and a heretic if you say no. But by and large, right, I was praying to the Trinity. I was praying to Christ who is fully God. And so, yeah, yeah, you know, I would, Christ was perfection embodied. And so, you know, God was not just good, God was perfection itself. And I was fortunate enough to have a relationship with perfection through Christ and through intimacy with him, through his sacrifice.
Speaker 1:
[23:51] But would you say your personal relationship is more with God? In other words, it's hard to think of them as two. You kind of have to pick who, you know, is it God or Jesus that you're kind of homies with?
Speaker 3:
[24:04] I don't think so. I think it was genuinely both. You know, it's sort of like Christ is the gateway to God and he is God himself.
Speaker 1:
[24:12] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[24:12] Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[24:13] Your Mormonism is showing, John.
Speaker 3:
[24:15] Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2:
[24:15] You want to separate them into two, which I have the same instinct to be like, okay, well, we need to pick one. I'm also struggling with this idea of what it could be.
Speaker 1:
[24:25] We had that. Was it Lord, was it Christ? When you picked one name for that being you would address, what was it?
Speaker 3:
[24:31] All of them. It wasn't one name. I mean, it truly is three in one. And I mean, it was like, you know, it's like, you know, it's frustrating because I'm imagining, you know, any of my Nicene Christian friends watching this and they're going to be like, oh, that's a heresy. That's a heresy because anytime you try to explain the Trinity, you wind up in theological pigeonholes that are technically incorrect because the Trinity as so defined is an ineffable mystery, right? But it's this pervasive sense of threeness and oneness in one that is, yeah, it's a mystery. And so, you know, as I would meditate on Christ, you know, I would think about Christ walking on the water or Christ feeding the 5,000. And it was like, this is God doing this. And it's also, you know, a human doing this. And then, you know, as I would, as I would worship, you know, the Lord, it would be like, well, I'm thinking about God, the Father, the creator of everything. I'm thinking about the Holy Spirit who was poured out on the day of Pentecost. And they kind of flowed into each other. And yet, remain some level of distinct, it's funky.
Speaker 1:
[25:52] What were some of the behavioral markers of your devotion and maybe ways you stood out from your peers behaviorally in high school?
Speaker 3:
[26:01] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[26:01] Were there some?
Speaker 3:
[26:02] No, I mean, I remember very vividly being 16 or so and thinking like, what kind of a person do I wanna be? You know, what kind of citizen do I wanna be? How do I want to exemplify the gospel? And I kind of like sketched out like, well, you know, I could be an upstanding citizen of my community and I could be the kind of guy who gets straight A's and is very well behaved and like, and I just kind of thought that through and I was like, that sounds really boring and stupid. Fuck that. Like, no, I want to be like, I want to be a zealot. Like I want to be a John the Baptist screaming in the wilderness, you know, telling people to repent of their, you know, of their greed, of their sexual immorality. And, and in addition to that, to fall in love with the God who is love himself. And so, I mean, I think that, you know, I was always looking for an opportunity to, you know, shoehorn Jesus into a conversation. I was always looking for an opportunity to, you know, to pray with somebody. I would, I would often ask people like, hey man, like, can I, can I bless you? Can I just, you know, take you aside and throw a hand on your shoulder and just go to the Lord and prayer with you. And then beyond that, like sexual purity was a huge thing for me. So, I don't know how detailed I can get, but I mean, I didn't look at porn or masturbate from, you know, 13 to 21. And I, in high school even, I took it so seriously that I was known as like the kid who would not hug women in high school. That was seen as like too sexually salacious for me. And I was like, no, it's, you know, I don't even want to approach, you know, the ring around the ring around the ring, which is, you know, the line in the sand that is sexual purity. Like I want nothing to do with it. I would take my contact lenses out of my head anytime I would go to the gym. So I wasn't even, like I literally couldn't even see the pretty girls working out at the gym. It was just, you know, so ridiculous.
Speaker 1:
[28:11] Dude, I made it to 26. I mean, I got married at 24, but I mean, that 26 was my first time to break that rule.
Speaker 3:
[28:21] Wow. That's wildly impressive.
Speaker 1:
[28:24] I mean, I don't know. It's just what happened. I don't think it was some huge thing to brag about necessarily now, but I mean... I just say I relate, is what I'm saying. Sure, sure.
Speaker 3:
[28:36] No, that's real.
Speaker 1:
[28:38] So did your peers, let's say there's a pie chart of peers who knew you in high school, what percent found you annoying and insufferable versus like super cool and like really special and neat versus kind of mad, normal or moderate or something like that? You have a sense?
Speaker 3:
[28:57] Yeah, yeah. I would say there was probably 50-50 with the caveat being that occasionally once in a blue moon, the ones who thought I was annoying would occasionally be like, all right, but you kind of warmed me over this time. I always remember there was this Lithuanian kid that we like, we imported him from Lithuania and like several other Lithuanian students explicitly to play basketball for our high school team. And like none of those guys were religious. They didn't give a crap about being at a Christian high school. And we weren't friends, we weren't close. But on the last day of school when everyone was signing each other's yearbooks, you know, he kind of like gave me a head nod and wrote like, God bless you, brother. You know, it's just like a like a small concession of like, hey, you're an annoying twerp, but I appreciate your heart. So.
Speaker 1:
[29:52] Did it fuel your confidence or your self-esteem to know you were like hyper righteous working for Jesus amongst your secular peers?
Speaker 3:
[30:04] Sometimes. Yeah, I mean, sometimes it did, right? Like it gives you a cosmic sense of worth knowing that like you are co-laboring with God to use a New Testament term to bring about goodness and righteousness and healing in the world. You know, you're bringing people closer to God who is love himself. And that feels really affirming. And it feels super disorienting walking away from that. So there's that. I think sometimes it felt like, yeah, man, I really wish that I wasn't a chaplain or a worship leader to my peers because it feels kind of like being a pastor in some sense, where it's like, I really wish I could just like bro out with these people and like, you know, make fart jokes and drink a beer and do all that. But it's like, no, but I'm in a different category. And I can't be that person to these people. Like I have a different vocation to in terms of like my relationship to them.
Speaker 2:
[31:06] So did you feel called to be doing what you were doing in that sense? Because you described it as a vocation. Yeah. Sort of a calling.
Speaker 3:
[31:12] Yeah, it's funny, right? Because I was homeschooled from seventh grade to tenth grade. And I was such a like when I had my conversion experience at 13, I was this weird kind of antisocial kid, right? And then I became religious and then became like explosively social. And then by the time I was in 10th grade, I was like, I really, really, really want to go back and like socialize with friends. And so sophomore, I'm sorry, junior and senior year, I went back to a Christian high school kind of with the explicit intention of preaching Jesus to kids who were already Christian. And so like, yeah, man, I would preach to the high schoolers and the middle schoolers two or three times a week and just stand up on stage and cry and implore them to come to the love of Christ and accept a true relationship with him. And so I saw that as kind of like a God given mission to preach to the Christian kids.
Speaker 1:
[32:20] But I'm curious, like I when I when I listen to this, Jared, I relate to your sense of mission and a sense of wanting to set a good example and to be hyper righteous. I wasn't as overtly preachy to my peers, but I but they all knew I was Mormon and they all knew I didn't drink or smoke or have sex. And they knew that I was down to talk religion if they wanted to. But I, for some reason, I stopped short of being like super evangelical. Nemo, I'm wondering how much you relate to kind of the identity and the approach that Jared had in high school.
Speaker 2:
[32:57] Yeah, I would say I was opinionated, but not preachy. As in, I had my strong opinions. If it came up, we'd talk about it. I would really defend the church. I'd be pushing the church. I would try and convert friends, but I wouldn't get up on a stage. It strikes me as quite interesting because you think about the early history of the church. We have pictures of Mormon missionaries in Britain standing in town squares and preaching. On boxes, preaching this similar way. And missionaries, even in the 50s, you got pictures of Ballard when he was talking about his mission in the UK. They used to stand in the town square, but somewhere along the way, Mormonism lost its town square preaching and engaging methods to the point where you weren't doing it, I wasn't doing it. It wasn't necessary part of the culture to stand up and be the spectacle and preach. It would happen more in conversations between people.
Speaker 1:
[33:43] And relationships.
Speaker 2:
[33:44] And relationships.
Speaker 1:
[33:45] That's how it was for me.
Speaker 2:
[33:46] Yeah, that's how we were taught to try and convert people is building relationships. That missionary preaching disappeared. I don't know quite where it did because it used to be there.
Speaker 1:
[33:55] Although there were missionaries, Mormon missionaries, that would stand on boxes.
Speaker 2:
[34:00] During your time?
Speaker 1:
[34:01] Yeah, it's rare. But I mean, you would always hear stories of some. So it wasn't unheard of, but it certainly wasn't the practice.
Speaker 2:
[34:08] It felt like, yeah, they were trying to almost copy the missionaries of old rather than...
Speaker 1:
[34:11] In England?
Speaker 2:
[34:12] Yeah, rather than doing what was kind of natural to us.
Speaker 1:
[34:14] Because you'd hear about Mormon missionaries going to England and converting 1,000 people, right?
Speaker 2:
[34:19] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[34:19] Anyway. Okay, cool. So did you ever commit some big sin in high school that you felt super guilty and shameful about?
Speaker 3:
[34:28] Man, call me out.
Speaker 1:
[34:29] Were you screwed up?
Speaker 3:
[34:30] No, no, and maybe that is genuinely a source of pride for me was my little Hellion days. All of that happened after I de-converted. Because I think I had a sense of like, you know, whenever someone's going through, you know, a time of deconstruction, I think that there's, you know, for some people, it's like they, they, they backslide to some degree, right? And it's like, well, you know, maybe I'll start drinking, or I'll start smoking, or I'll have sex with my girlfriend. And then they kind of like realize through that process, okay, maybe I actually didn't believe this as much as I thought I did. But for me, it was sort of like, no, like if I'm still going to claim this title of Christian, then I'm going to keep living that out. And so either like, yeah, I don't know, it was just like, I'm not going to bastardize the title like that. And so I felt like it was more appropriate for me to say, hey, I should, you know, deconvert rather than, you know, become a half-assed Christian. Not just because like I thought it wasn't true, but also because, yeah, I couldn't screw it up.
Speaker 2:
[36:01] That kind of all or nothing mentality of, I'm either going to be all in or I have to be out.
Speaker 3:
[36:06] And it's funny, right? Because there was a biblical reason for that for me. Famously in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says, if the dead are not raised, then we of all men are most to be pitied. And so he kind of gives this ultimatum and says like, listen, if this is just a, you know, helpful, useful fiction, then it's not worth believing. This is like, we've given so much for this gospel. If it's bullshit, then don't follow it. And then you start to believe that it's bullshit. And, you know, the house of card tumbles quick.
Speaker 2:
[36:45] But it's amazing how it doesn't always tumble quick for everyone because, you know, there are examples in Mormonism where an ultimatum like that is given, where it's like, hey, it's either all true or it's not. And then someone will discover a small way in which it's not true. And they'll find a way to justify that themselves so that they don't have to accept the terms of that ultimatum. So it's interesting that you did seem to accept the terms of that sort of ultimatum, whereas not everyone would necessarily.
Speaker 3:
[37:08] Yeah, and I'm not sure that, like, that ultimatum is top of mind for other people. And I wish that it weren't.
Speaker 2:
[37:16] Why do you think it was for you?
Speaker 3:
[37:17] I think it was because I was a Bible literalist. And, you know, I think that as somebody who really prioritized the 66 books of VAR canon, it was like, you know, it was spelled out pretty clearly for me. And I kind of took Paul up at his word. I think for other people, you know, they can still hold a level of cognitive dissonance and say, like, well, I don't know, maybe it is mythology, maybe it is mystery. Or if you're Jordan Peterson, maybe it's truer than true, right? But I don't think that any of those were ever an option for me.
Speaker 2:
[37:55] So to, I suppose, ask a question of, sometimes it's said that those who leave the Mormon Church were the most devout, often the ones that took it most seriously, perhaps. And do you think that's what plays in here is that when you take it very seriously and very literally, that then when you discover something that isn't right, you take those ultimatums. And so the people that are left who don't leave are the ones who are better able to be more flexible. And perhaps it leaves the church with its sort of middle ground.
Speaker 3:
[38:24] Yeah, yeah. There was a podcast that I went on maybe a year ago, and the host asked me that same question. And I think my response was something along the lines of like, I continually feel condescended to by Christians who never took it as seriously as I did. You know, the kind of like, you know, hey Jared, like, you know, it sounds like you were awfully hard on yourself. Did you ever just like enjoy the grace of Christ? I'm just like rolling my eyes like, dude, how many hours do I have to spend like wallowing in my room, you know, like crying at, you know, the undeserved grace of God that showers on me like rain, you know, like, how deep of an experience do I have to have to convince you that like, like, no, it was my everything, man.
Speaker 1:
[39:15] Mormons are often saddled, ex-Mormons are often saddled with the accusation that they never really believed to begin with, that they never, you know, just wanted an excuse to sin. And I was going to say, Nemo, if you think about like the prominent ex-Mormon YouTubers right now, me, you, you know, RFM, Bill Reel, Alyssa Grenfell, I would say on the spectrum of devotion, we all were higher than average devout. And so there's got to be something about sort of like, the more devout you were as a religious person, if you leave, the more likely you are to become an ex-religious YouTuber.
Speaker 2:
[40:00] Well, yeah, because I was going to bring that to you, Jared, do you feel like this same zealousness you were talking about where you'd get up on stage and spread your message and talk about it, is that what then led you to do this? I don't want to jump ahead because I want to go through the deconstruction process, just as a kind of tangent.
Speaker 3:
[40:14] I would say no. I would say that maybe my innate sense of wanting to speak up when something's wrong, like maybe that fuels part of it. And so that's maybe a common through line. But I would say probably my Atheist Church Audit thing, that was more so birthed out of my desire to better preach the Gospel. So kind of one of my maxims is that speaking is a platform that is earned through listening. And so I would be out on the streets trying to share the Gospel with a Muslim. And it felt kind of lame that I was inviting him to my church without even being willing to extend that offer both ways. You know, like, well, what if he invites me to his mosque? And so that was kind of what prompted me to start exploring other faith communities was like, hey, if I'm going to have the gall to, you know, ask this person to change their religion and, you know, take me at my word, I need to be able to explore their faith at least well enough to know that I'm not, like, making a mockery of it every time I try to talk to them about it. So I went to a couple of mosques when I was still in seminary.
Speaker 1:
[41:26] Before, I want to get there, before we do, you mentioned in high school your brother told you that it was all bullshit. I think you said the word was. So tell us about in high school, the anti-Christian or anti-bible kind of messages, the main ones that you were confronted with, that you had, I guess, that shaped you to become an apologist, a Christian apologist at some point. What were the big doubts or questions about your own faith that you had to hit early? Sure, sure. What were the big ones?
Speaker 3:
[41:58] So like when I came to faith, it was 2013. And so that was kind of right at the cutting edge, maybe a little bit late, but kind of right there, square in the middle of the new atheist movement. And so, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins were there on the scene posing.
Speaker 2:
[42:16] Don't forget Grayling.
Speaker 3:
[42:17] Who?
Speaker 2:
[42:18] We don't forget AC. Grayling.
Speaker 3:
[42:19] Who?
Speaker 2:
[42:20] He's the fourth one. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[42:22] He's not the fourth one.
Speaker 2:
[42:23] No, it's Dennett. It's Dennett. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[42:25] Oh, Dennett.
Speaker 2:
[42:25] I was messing with you. Carry on.
Speaker 3:
[42:28] But, you know, like all of those people were posing these real challenges to my faith. You know, whether that was like biblical literalism, right? The issue of the resurrection and its historicity. Young Earth creationism and evolution was a thing. But like I kind of moved past that and squared with theistic evolution eventually. And then just, you know, the philosophical and theological arguments against it, right? So I think that all of those were really like the problem of evil, the problem of evil, the problem of the biblical canon. The word, what else? I mean, the problem of religious exclusivity was big.
Speaker 1:
[43:16] And are you wrestling with these things in high school?
Speaker 3:
[43:19] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[43:19] As you're preaching to everyone about...
Speaker 3:
[43:21] Of course.
Speaker 1:
[43:22] So did that lead, because I'm really relating to this, because I had all those questions in high school as a Mormon. Were you privately questioning and doubting? How were you resolving some of these really big major challenges to your faith?
Speaker 3:
[43:36] No, I mean, I think I started reading apologetics, right?
Speaker 1:
[43:40] Christian apologetics.
Speaker 3:
[43:41] Christian apologetics, yeah. I mean, kind of at a novice level, right? I was a high schooler. But I started devouring William Lane Craig's content when I was still in high school.
Speaker 1:
[43:49] About what?
Speaker 3:
[43:51] Well, he's got answers about the problem of evil. He's got answers regarding...
Speaker 1:
[43:57] How does he solve that one? I'm dying to know. Quickly, one minute.
Speaker 2:
[44:02] Do we have time for that?
Speaker 3:
[44:03] One minute. One common apologetic way to solve the problem of evil is to say that, well, by asking the question, you're acknowledging that there is such a thing as evil, which implies the existence of good, which therefore implies the existence of a divine, ubiquitous standard of good versus evil. And so the only way that you're able to ask that question is because God exists and he is the definition of what goodness is.
Speaker 2:
[44:30] I mean, there's so many logical leaps in that. It's scary.
Speaker 1:
[44:33] No, it's good. But it's fun to hear.
Speaker 2:
[44:34] But yeah.
Speaker 3:
[44:35] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[44:35] Okay, how about evolution? This is fun. So how did you resolve evolution as a high schooler? Oh, I mean, the age of the earth and evolution.
Speaker 3:
[44:44] Yeah, I mean, I think that I probably took the normal trajectory of being like starting off as a young earth creationist, 6,000 years old.
Speaker 1:
[44:51] Earth.
Speaker 3:
[44:51] The earth is 6,000 years old. And then eventually slid into, well, okay, it's old earth creationism, right? That the universe and the earth are billions of years old. But evolution is still BS, right? There was still a literal Garden of Eden, still a literal Adam and Eve and a literal serpent. And then eventually, you know, it fell into a theistic evolution, which looks at Genesis in terms of like divine history, right? Or religious history, rather than like literalistic history. It's trying to...
Speaker 1:
[45:27] It's myth. It's metaphor.
Speaker 3:
[45:28] Yeah. I think myth will always sound like fiction to Christians. And so I want to like be careful with my terms because myth has the connotation of just being bullshit. And I think that to be fair to my theistic evolutionary friends, they would say like, no, it's a truth truer than true.
Speaker 1:
[45:50] Yeah. I think Joseph Campbell.
Speaker 3:
[45:51] Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[45:52] I don't mean it in a disparaging way. What about global flood literal Noah, the two of every animal on the ark?
Speaker 3:
[46:00] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[46:00] How did you reconcile that in high school?
Speaker 3:
[46:02] In high school, I mean, for a little while there, there was some kind of like pseudo sciency like, well, you know, this obscure journal of archaeology in Germany, you know, found this discovery that allegedly proves a worldwide flood or like, you know, because there's, there's apologists kind of across the spectrum, right? So you've got younger apologists who are gung ho on trying to really prove the worldwide flood and debunk evolution. And then you've got much more sophisticated apologists in my mind, who are defending a much more cautious or humble version of Christianity. So, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[46:48] I've got one for you.
Speaker 3:
[46:49] Hit me.
Speaker 1:
[46:49] Did you ever have a Christian apologist claim that the core of the earth was ice? And that's how, that's where the water receded to after the global flood. Receded back to the core of the earth and became an ice core.
Speaker 3:
[47:05] No.
Speaker 1:
[47:05] All right. We got one out of you. There's a Mormon apologetic group that claims, you look at your face, look at his face right now. We got somebody who said this to Rod Meldrum. Send that face to Rod Meldrum.
Speaker 3:
[47:17] Dude, I've just come to accept that like there's always somebody out there with a weirder idea.
Speaker 2:
[47:23] Every time Rod Meldrum posts something, I'm just going to send him that face as a react.
Speaker 1:
[47:27] That needs to be a meme.
Speaker 3:
[47:28] Let's do it. Let's do it.
Speaker 1:
[47:29] Memeify.
Speaker 3:
[47:29] Make me a meme, 26.
Speaker 1:
[47:31] I don't mean any disrespect, really. Okay, how about like, yeah, did you think about Biblical criticism in high school? And how did you reconcile like discrepancies in the gospels and contradictions?
Speaker 3:
[47:48] Well, I mean, I think that when you're-
Speaker 1:
[47:49] Bart Ehrman stuff, basically. Oh, and you would have been in Bart Ehrman's backyard. Yeah, yeah. Did you know you were in Bart Ehrman's backyard? In high school?
Speaker 3:
[47:56] I kind of knew when I started watching some of his stuff and reading his books. It would have been a tiny bit later for me. I think I started like, I read his, one of his first books when I was like 20. Yeah, I was doing an archaeological dig in Palestine.
Speaker 1:
[48:09] Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:
[48:11] Yeah, reading through his book Forged and was like still trying to figure out like, oh shit, how do I deal with this?
Speaker 1:
[48:17] What was the main thesis of that book? Of Forged?
Speaker 3:
[48:20] Essentially that there's pseudopigrapha in the New Testament. So the easiest book to debunk is the Book of Second Peter. There's just no conceivable way that that was written by an Aramaic-speaking fisherman in rural Galilee.
Speaker 1:
[48:34] He knew too much. The writer knew too much.
Speaker 3:
[48:37] Yeah, and so eventually, Christian apologists will find different ways to work around that. They'll either say, well, it was Peter's core ideas that were written down by a scribe who was speaking Greek and translating it, or you could say that it was a letter that came out of the Petrin School of Theology. So, I mean, there's ways to get around it. But I think that kind of, you know, at the age of 23, after going through three years of pseudo seminary and two years of my second theology degree, I just got tired of squinting. And I kind of came to realize, like, I think the reality is that I really, really want this to be true. And I don't think that that's sufficient reason for saying that it is.
Speaker 2:
[49:25] Can I ask a quick question before we get into that?
Speaker 3:
[49:28] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[49:29] Was there ever a point at which, before you started to engage with apologetics, before you started trying to come up with answers, was there ever a point you attempted just to bury your head in the sand at these questions, at these challenges to the Bible?
Speaker 3:
[49:39] No.
Speaker 2:
[49:39] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[49:40] I vividly remember talking to one of my Bible teachers in high school, and you could tell that he was probably five, six years older than me. And he was kind of gently admitting to that, you know, like, you know, man, I've, I got really, you know, anxious, you know, the past couple of years, really dealing with all these apologetic questions. And, and I think I just came to a place where I realized like, hey, this is where I've, you know, staked my claim, and I'm happy here. And I, you know, I just, I feel better about, like, not having to worry about it all the time.
Speaker 1:
[50:14] Why are you nodding, Nemo?
Speaker 2:
[50:15] Well, because that tracks perfectly onto the Mormon experience for many people.
Speaker 3:
[50:18] Sure, sure.
Speaker 1:
[50:19] There's plenty of Mormons who are like, ah, it's my tribe.
Speaker 2:
[50:20] It's my tribe, they're my people.
Speaker 1:
[50:21] You know, whatever.
Speaker 3:
[50:22] Yeah, and, and I.
Speaker 1:
[50:23] It works for me. It's a great way to live.
Speaker 3:
[50:25] Yeah. And I, I don't have any disrespect for them.
Speaker 1:
[50:29] No, there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 3:
[50:30] I think, I think, candidly, like, you know, the more I explore these religious communities, especially communities that are foreign to me, it's like, man, I just want these people to be well.
Speaker 1:
[50:42] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[50:42] I don't give a shit if you have some weird conspiratorial ideas about the center of the earth or about, you know, aliens visiting us or like...
Speaker 1:
[50:49] You did make a weird face, though.
Speaker 3:
[50:50] I did make a weird face. It's, you know...
Speaker 1:
[50:52] No, it's good. It's good.
Speaker 3:
[50:54] But at the end of the day, do you love your wife? Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[50:57] Are you good to your kids?
Speaker 3:
[50:58] Are you good to your kids? Like, are you...
Speaker 1:
[51:00] Kind.
Speaker 3:
[51:01] Are you, you know, siloed and sectarian and terrified of everyone around you or are you good? And if you're the latter, then like, I'm not trying to crop on your faith or make you de-convert.
Speaker 1:
[51:13] As a believing Christian, were you ever confronted with like, Christian nationalism or, or Christian racism?
Speaker 3:
[51:26] No, I would say the opposite. And this is still kind of a world that I'm still unpacking and still trying to like really wrap my head around. When I was in that world, I saw the ways in which Christianity was a force for anti-racism.
Speaker 1:
[51:47] Nice.
Speaker 3:
[51:49] My children's church pastor, the guy who like, you know, looked after our kids was a former neo-Nazi and not in the kind of like, you know, that term gets hurled at a lot of people. I mean, the dude had like a big swastika tattooed on his arm. I mean, he was scary and he got saved. He was softened. And, you know, he ended up doing prison ministry with, you know, shoulder to shoulder with black men in his community. Hallelujah. Right? Like that was my experience of Christianity and racism. That's not the full experience and not at all to like belittle, you know, the very real terrible, terrible awful history of, you know, racism and Christianity in America. Hell, the Southern Baptist Convention started because they were pro-racism or pro-slavery. So like there's more to that story. But my own personal experience was that. I also, you know, the Pentecostal Pseudoseminary that I went to would be loosely affiliated with what's called the New Apostolic Reformation, the NAR, the NAR, and, you know, kind of the Bill Johnson, Chris Vallaton, Apostle Catherine Crick would kind of be in that sphere as well. And they often get lumped into like the Christian nationalist, you know, sphere. And they often are like some of the, Paula White, for example, like she's kind of in that sphere. And so, you know, she is Trump's spiritual advisor. They would very heavily be pigeonholed as, you know, de facto Christian nationalists. But when I was in seminary, I took a whole course on religious freedoms in America. And the entire course was like blatantly anti-Christian nationalists. And it was saying like, hey, listen, if we, you know, don't give our Muslim neighbors the same rights and freedoms that we are trying to afford to our Christian friends, then we're shooting ourselves in the foot. And we are, you know, dooming ourselves by creating a legal system that, you know, favors us now, but is going to, you know, turn on us when the powers that be decide that they don't like our version of Christianity. And so it's still difficult for me to parse through that. And it's it's something that I'm still reading about.
Speaker 1:
[54:15] All right. So as you graduate from high school, did many of your peers want to go to Wheaton? Was that a sign of your extra religiosity?
Speaker 3:
[54:24] Well, so before I went to Wheaton, I went to fire school of ministry. So after high school, yeah, I went there. I was the only kid in my class who did. And yeah, man, it was it was three years of chaos. Fire school of ministry is kind of hyper charismatic. So like we had an entire college level course on the love of God, a college level course on casting out demons, a college level course on speaking in tongues, casting out demons, a whole course on speaking in tongues or casting out demons. Yeah, man.
Speaker 1:
[54:56] Whoa, it's the Mormons.
Speaker 2:
[54:58] What does that look like?
Speaker 1:
[55:01] Yeah, a semester on casting out demons.
Speaker 3:
[55:04] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[55:05] How do you get past lecture one?
Speaker 3:
[55:07] You mean how did I get past lecture?
Speaker 2:
[55:09] Well, no, how is there more than one lecture on that?
Speaker 1:
[55:11] This sounds like Defense Against the Dark Arts, basically.
Speaker 3:
[55:13] Basically, yeah. I mean, it was kind of Hogwarts.
Speaker 2:
[55:16] Again, like, if speaking in tongues is a, okay, so speaking in tongues is a genuine manifestation of a being moved upon by the Spirit of God, right? How do you teach that?
Speaker 3:
[55:26] Well, it's not that you're teaching it. You're teaching the theology around it.
Speaker 2:
[55:30] Right, okay.
Speaker 3:
[55:31] Right. So, I mean, you know, what is the significance of glossolalia, which is speaking other languages, no, I'm sorry, glossolalia is speaking with heavenly languages and Xenolalia, like the same etymological root as xenophobia in nations, is, you know, speaking miraculously in other languages, right? Speaking Chinese on the flip of a dime because you're a missionary in Taiwan.
Speaker 2:
[55:53] Well, and that's the version that Mormons believe in.
Speaker 1:
[55:55] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[55:55] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[55:56] Right.
Speaker 2:
[55:57] Xenolalia.
Speaker 1:
[55:58] Now.
Speaker 2:
[55:58] Now.
Speaker 1:
[55:59] Back then, it was.
Speaker 2:
[56:00] Yes. Again, like with the preaching and the standing on soapboxes, it's changed. It's become a bit more boring.
Speaker 1:
[56:06] Less supernatural.
Speaker 2:
[56:08] Yes, indeed.
Speaker 3:
[56:09] Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[56:10] So, wow. A semester on speaking in tongues, a semester on casting on demons. Did you ever successfully cast out a demon? I want to know. Or were you ever possessed by a demon? I want to know.
Speaker 3:
[56:21] Well, the story that I always tell is, you know, one of my good friends at the seminary. He was kind of a little hellion, like we both were. And so they would kind of pair you up with a person and they would ask you to go through this list of very pensive prayers and just see if you have any kind of like demonic residue in there. Just kind of do like a demon cleanse.
Speaker 1:
[56:45] Like a spiritual Geiger counter.
Speaker 3:
[56:47] Yeah, yeah. And so, we went through the whole prayers and it was a big nothing burger, but he walked up to other kids in the class afterwards and he was like, dude, can I be real with you? I laid my hands on Jared and I said, Lord, if there's anything in him that's not of you, just let it come out of him right now. And he was like, and I kid you not, y'all, a face came out of his chest and went, aah!
Speaker 1:
[57:16] And you didn't notice that?
Speaker 3:
[57:18] I didn't, well, no.
Speaker 1:
[57:19] It was your chest, your shirt.
Speaker 3:
[57:20] Yeah, he was telling tall tales.
Speaker 1:
[57:22] But you didn't what?
Speaker 3:
[57:23] He was just telling tall tales. He was just telling the other kids in the class that like a demonic face emerged from my chest cavity and started chomping at people.
Speaker 1:
[57:30] No, but I mean, I know that because we, as Mormons, taught about evil spirits and exorcisms, that that made it more likely, yeah, that made it more likely that kids in high school might have an experience where they perceived some sort of demon or some need for an exorcism.
Speaker 3:
[57:50] What does an exorcism look like in the Mormon world? Not to derail, but.
Speaker 1:
[57:54] I mean, you raise your right arm to the square and you say, demon, you know, in the name of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Monk, as you please, which I bear, I command you to depart.
Speaker 3:
[58:05] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[58:05] And that's actually part of the Mormon temple ceremony. Peter, I believe, in the Mormon temple ceremony, casts out Satan from the guard of Eden by raising his right arm to the square and casting him out. Well, you look perplexed. You did a whole semester on this.
Speaker 3:
[58:19] Yeah, well.
Speaker 1:
[58:19] Why are you teaching me? Why am I teaching you how this works? You did this semester.
Speaker 3:
[58:23] Well, you guys have got some extra fodder in your canon that we don't have.
Speaker 1:
[58:27] We meant it. You were just playing around. You guys are playing church. We're actually, you get the joke?
Speaker 2:
[58:32] Yeah, we put the Brad Wilcox clip in there.
Speaker 1:
[58:34] You guys, y'all were playing church. We were doing church.
Speaker 3:
[58:36] Damn.
Speaker 1:
[58:37] I'm kidding.
Speaker 3:
[58:38] I'm joking.
Speaker 1:
[58:38] I'm teasing.
Speaker 3:
[58:39] Got him.
Speaker 1:
[58:39] I'm teasing. No, I had a mission president who asked me to curse a house.
Speaker 2:
[58:46] Interesting.
Speaker 1:
[58:47] So I was with a companion teaching this really rich woman, and my companion was a dark-skinned sort of a, they were called Indios in Guatemala. They're native Guatemalans that didn't have a European lighter brown skin. They had the dark, blacker skin, and there was really bad racism in Guatemala and Latin America between the brown-skinned mezclados, the European and Indios mixed, versus just the natives. And she was just super racist and mean to him, to his face. And he cried when we got home, and we told the mission president, and he asked me and my other companion to go to the guy's house, raise our, well, perform the dusting off of the feet ceremony, which is in the Doctrine and Covenants, which is literally to perform a cursing of the house. And so I and my companion, Elder Peeble, are all dusted off our feet and cursed this woman's house.
Speaker 3:
[59:46] How do you balance that with turning the other cheek?
Speaker 1:
[59:49] I mean, Joseph Smith said it, you do what Joseph Smith said. I mean, obviously, you would have known this even in high school, that the Bible is full of contradictions.
Speaker 3:
[59:56] Sure, sure.
Speaker 1:
[59:57] Right? On the one hand, Jesus is saying, love everyone. On the other hand, God is committing genocide, right?
Speaker 2:
[60:04] I think Joseph Smith himself referenced that in the Happiness Letter. He says, at times, God will say, thou shalt not kill, and at other times, he shall say, thou shalt utterly destroy. He was leaning into the contradictions of saying, and really, it's just about when God says, or when God through his servant says, this is what we should do, then that's what we should do. We should do what's expedient for the time.
Speaker 3:
[60:21] Sure.
Speaker 2:
[60:22] It's no secret that Mormon theology is about expedience, and that's why living prophets can guide that expedience. Whatever is necessary at the time for God's children is what the church gets to do.
Speaker 1:
[60:33] But it felt weird as a Christian missionary to be cursing the household.
Speaker 3:
[60:37] I can imagine.
Speaker 1:
[60:38] In the name of Jesus. I did it. I had the request of my mission president. It's in my journal too. I've got it written in. Anyway, so back to you. Okay, so you go to this hyper Christian, was it a college?
Speaker 3:
[60:55] I tend to call it a pseudo seminary because people don't even have a category for it. It was a three-year non-accredited degree in practical ministry, whatever the hell that means. But it was like 50 kids stuffed into a couple of trailers behind a church out in Concord, North Carolina. Like it wasn't a thing, but I mean, it was...
Speaker 2:
[61:11] Did you get a certificate though?
Speaker 3:
[61:13] Yeah, it's probably scribbled out in crayon, but yeah, yeah, I did.
Speaker 1:
[61:16] And your parents didn't mind you going there?
Speaker 3:
[61:18] No, they were super supportive because, you know, it's funny, after high school, I was like, well, you know, I could go to a four-year Christian college, like Wheaton College, but I don't want to go there because that's where, you know, fiery, passionate Christians go to lose their zeal and I want to be a zealot, so I'm going to go to a place called Fire and, you know, take over the world for Jesus and set this world ablaze.
Speaker 1:
[61:40] Wheaton wasn't intense enough for you.
Speaker 3:
[61:41] No, God, no. That was like a pansy school in my mind in 18.
Speaker 1:
[61:46] It's like BYU-Idaho versus BYU-Provo.
Speaker 2:
[61:48] It's like people who go to BYU-Idaho because they're like, BYU-Provo is too liberal.
Speaker 3:
[61:51] Seriously.
Speaker 1:
[61:52] Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[61:53] And BYU-I is where it's at.
Speaker 1:
[61:55] It's next level.
Speaker 3:
[61:56] Dang. The more you know.
Speaker 1:
[61:58] Fun.
Speaker 3:
[61:59] So yeah, then at 21, graduated from there and was like, well, guess I have to start from scratch and get a real degree.
Speaker 1:
[62:07] So why slum at Wheaton then after you reached your spiritual pinnacle?
Speaker 3:
[62:12] So part of my story is that I spent one semester out in the Netherlands at like a satellite campus that we had, which is hilarious. Like 50 kids in a school have a satellite campus. And that place, I'm comfortable calling a cult. That very tight knit insular community showed all of the sure signs of being a high control group. And that was pretty disorienting and damaging. So at 21, after I graduated from that school, I was like, okay, well, I would love to remain a Christian because I still love Jesus. I still love scripture. That was a bit much. Let's see if we can go to a place that's a little bit more academically rigorous, a little bit more intellectual and see if we can patch things up there. And so I went to Wheaton College wanting to be like an ancient languages major. And candidly, I wanted to be like a Christian Bart Ehrman, but then quickly realized that, like, oh, you have to be smart to study ancient languages. And so I pivoted and studied Christian heavy metal instead.
Speaker 2:
[63:26] So had you already got that desire for like all that fondness for heavy metal music before?
Speaker 3:
[63:33] Yeah, I mean, that was kind of like one of the most fun parts of my upbringing, right? Was somehow, even though my faith was like very austere in some regards, it was always permissible to bang my head and thrash around in a mosh pit for Jesus. So like the Christian metal scene raised me. I didn't listen to metal music before I discovered Christian metal music. And so like to this day, heavy metal music to me has the connotation of like, oh, the grandeur of God, you know, the omnipotence of God the Father, you know, the badassery of the apostles in the New Testament. Like, it's a very unique experience, but yeah, burly dudes and biker jackets kind of raised me in the faith.
Speaker 2:
[64:19] Because just to give the sort of the Mormon parallel there, you and I did a video, I believe it's called What in the Hill Song is This? Where the Mormon Church started to do these sort of festivals where there was contemporary worship music, which has never been part of the Mormon playbook. Until that point, it seems like they're taking a Leif out of the Hill Song. But because Mormon worship music has been, for the longest time, the Tabernacle Choir, it was, you know, very, I don't know what you call it, just standard Protestant choral music. And that's what it was. And there was all these things about appropriateness of music. If you want to try to do a musical item in a sacrament meeting, it had to be within certain bounds. There's an idea of the spirit within the church that is all about reverence. Feeling the spirit is about things being reverent and quiet and orderly. The pinnacle of Mormon worship is sitting quietly in a room for two hours, and then going and sitting quietly in another room, and then going and getting changed and going home. That's the pinnacle of Mormon religious worship, as far as it's contained in the temple ceremony. It's all about quietness and order. You and I went to a temple open house today. One of the things I said to you was, you're not getting the full experience of what it's like in the temple, because actually it's too noisy right now, because there's too many people in here, chattering around and moving around. It's a very quiet, austere thing. So that's what feeling the spirit is, which is why it's so odd from a Mormon perspective to have this idea of thrash metal music being a Christian form of worship to us, and to then see the church moving towards these worship concerts, because that's not reverent. That makes sense, John?
Speaker 1:
[65:49] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[65:51] That's wild.
Speaker 1:
[65:52] So for you, there was no contradiction between heavy metal rock music and Christianity.
Speaker 2:
[65:56] You could feel the spirit in that.
Speaker 3:
[65:58] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[65:59] Did you grow up in worship services with rock music, basically?
Speaker 3:
[66:03] I mean, kind of like the Hillsong rock music that Nemo is talking about. Yeah, that was pretty common. But then kind of like in my personal worship time, it was would alternate between like this really serene, you know, still quiet, you know, music. Sometimes it was choir music, sometimes it was soft rock or whatever. And then, you know, jumping up and down on my bed and, you know, shouting Jesus to the heavens and, you know, declaring the victory of Christ's sacrifice over all the world. And yeah, like there was never any conflict there in my mind.
Speaker 1:
[66:40] So, did you start that band in the... Yeah, so the......Causi Seminary Place you would do?
Speaker 3:
[66:47] Yeah, so the name of my YouTube channel is also the name of my one-man metal band.
Speaker 1:
[66:52] It was a one-man metal band?
Speaker 3:
[66:53] Yeah, yeah. So I'm just a... I'm a solo musician playing guitar and bass and screaming into a microphone in my bedroom. And...
Speaker 1:
[67:02] Heliocentric. That was the name of the one-man band?
Speaker 3:
[67:05] Yeah, yeah. And it's still on going, still writing new music, but...
Speaker 1:
[67:09] And it was about glory to Christ kind of thing?
Speaker 3:
[67:11] Yeah, yeah. I mean...
Speaker 1:
[67:14] Give us some examples, lyrics of one of your songs.
Speaker 3:
[67:17] Oh, goodness. Well, so my first album... Let's see. My first album was all about the martyrs. So like the martyrs and what's called the anti-Nicene era. So prior to the Council of Nicaea in 325. And, yeah, each song was cataloging the different story of a different martyr. So like I've got a couplet of songs that deal with Perpetua and Felicitas, two martyrs in Carthage who were martyred in, I believe, 201 AD. And like just the most like harrowing stories, you know, these gut wrenching stories of these two young women who, you know, according to this to the story, you know, gladly went to the sword and, you know, first took everything for the sake of Christ. And so it's kind of these two songs that are really like wrestling with the tension of that and grieving, you know, the fact that they, you know, they left orphans behind, right? I'm trying to think of a lyric from that one song.
Speaker 1:
[68:25] No, I put you on the spot. It's okay.
Speaker 3:
[68:27] No, no, no.
Speaker 1:
[68:27] A long time ago.
Speaker 3:
[68:33] The last line in one of the songs, I'm imagining the mother, Perpetua, saying to her child who's wrestling with the death of her mother and, or yeah, and she says, you know, the child says, I watched my mother fall where she stood. And then the mother says, I fell into the arms of the God whose face fell upon us. And then the child responds, I will rise and meet you in the air. I'm going to cry if I think about it, man. Because it's such a beautiful story. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[69:12] A mother and a daughter getting martyred, getting killed, stabbed.
Speaker 3:
[69:16] Well, she left her child behind to be raised, essentially as an orphan. And that's part of the tension there in the story is, did she make the wrong call?
Speaker 1:
[69:28] So the mother dies, the daughter watches the mom get killed?
Speaker 3:
[69:31] Not necessarily. I think it was probably, you know, yeah, I don't think that they would have allowed that, but.
Speaker 1:
[69:36] And is this kind of, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but like screamo?
Speaker 3:
[69:40] Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[69:41] Okay. So you're like screaming these lyrics about this touching scene of a mother dying, leaving a daughter behind.
Speaker 3:
[69:48] Yeah. And I think the screaming is kind of, you know.
Speaker 1:
[69:52] Is it cathartic?
Speaker 3:
[69:53] Yeah. And I mean, I think that metal, you know, normally like it has the sound or the connotation, rather, of being angry. But to me, a lot of times the connotation is like anguish. You know, you're screaming about things that are not right in this hellish world, and you're wishing that they were. And so that's kind of the general vibe of a lot of my music.
Speaker 2:
[70:18] And Jared, I will say, is the archetypal metal musician, in that he's smiling and lovely and quite softly spoken when you talk to him and interview him. And then you hear the sounds that come out of his mouth when he makes music, and it's very different. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[70:30] So check out Heliocentric YouTube channel for more. Okay. So I want to talk forever about your story, but we got to hear about your encountering Mormonism. So let's jump to, how did you lose your faith at Wheaton?
Speaker 3:
[70:46] Man, I think, you know, I was 23, was pretty disillusioned with everything. And it was sort of like, you know, I loved my faith. I loved my religion, but I kind of just came to feel like it was the most intellectually honest to say, hey, I really love this, and I really love Christianity and Christ and then scripture. But I just don't think it's true.
Speaker 1:
[71:13] What were the, let's just say, three to five biggest issues that took you out? If you can...
Speaker 3:
[71:18] I don't like to say.
Speaker 1:
[71:20] What do you mean?
Speaker 3:
[71:21] I usually...
Speaker 1:
[71:22] You know, but you don't like to talk about it.
Speaker 3:
[71:24] Yeah, because I usually refrain from saying... for a few different reasons. One, I'm not a debater. And I feel like anytime I offer up the reasons for why I left the faith, it just opens the door for a slew of response videos to say why those reasons were invalid. And I just don't like playing that game.
Speaker 1:
[71:49] Interesting.
Speaker 3:
[71:51] So, suffice it to say, I was a true believer and now I'm truly not. And the other reason is that I don't really relish the idea of putting other people in the emotionally distressing place that I was in, by having people question my faith and do all of that. I think that if somebody wants to leave, they can Google ten reasons why the Bible isn't true, or ten reasons why Jesus didn't rise from the dead. They can find resources like that. But I don't think it's my goal to impose questioning on people like that, if they're not in a season of life where they're ready for that.
Speaker 1:
[72:38] That's beautiful and it condemns about 10,000 hours of my programming. Well, I'm kidding.
Speaker 3:
[72:46] No, I mean, I think also like to some degree, like, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but in my mind, we're doing somewhat slightly different things. Like, I don't know. I think that I should say yours, Nemo.
Speaker 2:
[73:00] Yeah, my YouTube channel down the toilet.
Speaker 1:
[73:04] No, no, sorry to interrupt this.
Speaker 3:
[73:05] No, no, no. But I mean, like, I think that what you're both doing, like there's a super important place for it, like, especially, you know, if I really enjoyed your conversation with Greg Matson, I watched that just before coming here and I loved, you know, both of the, I love that conversation. I think you mentioned to him, just like, I don't know, you mentioned to him the idea that like, well, you know, the church has kind of had a racket on, you know, information about the church for so long and like, hey, this isn't trying to, you know, steal the spotlight from what the church is doing or upend everything the church has ever done. It's just to offer the other perspective. And I think that that's totally fair and totally valid.
Speaker 1:
[74:02] Yeah, people like one of the ways I think I and Mormon Stories and maybe you, Nemo, are most misunderstood. People are convinced that I hate the church, that I want to see the church destroyed, and that all I'm trying to do, I was once called a spiritual Jack Kevorkian that, you know, the people that you know, that is Jack Kevorkian made his name in the 80s and 90s because he was the first, I think, physician to come out for physician-assisted suicide. So he was called Dr. Death.
Speaker 3:
[74:33] Wow.
Speaker 1:
[74:33] And he actually performed illegal euthanasia with like terminally ill, super suffering patients and recorded it and would share it and would be willing to go to jail just to say the way, you know, our medical system prolongs suffering and takes advantage of the people who are sick. People should have the right to die under their own terms without suffering, without ruining their life savings or going bankrupt or bankrupting their family. Anyway, he was called Dr. Death. And then people have called me or Mormon Stories sort of. That's so John just loves like a vampire sucking the faith out of, you know, people's faith. But the weird thing is, is like you, I love it if belief provides meaning. I have zero desire to take people's belief away. I'm not even trying to get them not to believe anymore. And I actually have a lot of love for the church. And I just want to see it get healthy. I don't think the world is better off if the church is destroyed or goes away. It's all just what you said. And I felt like I might have, I and like hundreds of thousands of other people I've met, feel like they may have made very different decisions if they've been given all the information. And I like to tell myself the way that I would answer the accusation that we're trying to take people's faith away is, we release three to five hour episodes. Because it takes a matter of initiative and interest to want to sit through a three to five hour episode, and only people who really want or need to know are going to give it more than five minutes. I mean, that's kind of a way I justify it to myself.
Speaker 3:
[76:18] Sure, sure.
Speaker 1:
[76:18] But anyway, sorry to go on that rant.
Speaker 3:
[76:20] No, no, no.
Speaker 2:
[76:21] As I make short, sharp, snappy videos just to really get in the punch.
Speaker 1:
[76:26] Nemo's the best.
Speaker 3:
[76:27] Calling yourself out. I mean, at the end of the day, I want my religious friends to do religion better. I don't particularly care if you're on the inside or outside of a faith. I just want to see you do well. And I tend to see my stuff as kind of, what would you call it, like an outsider's consult? An outsider's consultation. You know, because, you know, I don't think the solution 100% of the time is just, yeah, you need to leave and walk away from faith. I think there's plenty of valid times where it's like, no, you stay in, man. Like, I'm here for it. You know, but if you're on the verge of suicide, if you're, you know, beating yourself up over your sexuality or, you know, you're being exploited financially or, you know, being forced into forced labor, then we have a problem. You know, then we should have a real heart to heart. But, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[77:36] So you lost your faith around 23, age 23?
Speaker 3:
[77:40] Yeah, yeah, I was 23.
Speaker 1:
[77:41] And you're how old now?
Speaker 3:
[77:43] 31.
Speaker 1:
[77:44] So how did you go from losing your faith to starting a YouTube channel? Well, starting or pivoting a YouTube channel towards what you're doing now?
Speaker 3:
[77:56] I think the real start was like, you know, I was an atheist for several years and I would still go to churches sometimes. Just kind of like casually, you know, like, yeah, I don't have any spite for these people. I think that that's kind of one of the weird dimensions of my atheism is that, or maybe one of the unique things about it is for a lot of atheists I know, they feel as though religion were imposed on them. You know, it was shoved down their throat or, you know, they had some, you know, prick of a pastor who was really domineering. And I had like the occasional person in my life like that, that wasn't the trajectory of my faith. It was very self-sustaining. You know, it was me in my bedroom, me forcing myself to, you know, take on these really austere, you know, rules against, you know, sexuality and all of this. Like no one was imposing that on me. And so when I left it, it wasn't like, oh, screw this pastor or screw this preacher, screw this church or denomination. I just didn't think it was true. And so I think that left me a lot more gracious to like the average member and the average church.
Speaker 2:
[79:22] Well, did you feel like there was an institution that you belonged to?
Speaker 3:
[79:26] No.
Speaker 2:
[79:27] Right, because I feel like that may be where there's a key difference here is that those who leave the Mormon faith very much are leaving an institution and they had a relationship to that institution as well as their own personal faith. And so they're going to be dealing not only with the loss of their personal faith, but also the changing of their relationship to that institution.
Speaker 3:
[79:46] Yeah. That sucks.
Speaker 2:
[79:48] That leads to different behaviors, perhaps.
Speaker 3:
[79:49] I mean, it kind of grieves me that there's any spirituality or spiritual system that is so closely intertwined with an institution like that.
Speaker 2:
[79:59] Yeah. But Mormonism, if you could define it as anything, it's gatekeeping. I think it is gatekeeping the relationship to Jesus Christ. You have a relationship to Jesus Christ by walking the covenant path. And how do you walk the covenant path? Well, by performing the covenants that we provide you access to through our temples that you need to pay in order to enter, through communities that you have to be baptized into and you have to show up for and be involved in. And I don't think it's possible in the way that Mormonism is presenting itself to have a Mormon faith as an individual, like you've described the way that you had a faith in your bedroom. I don't think it's possible to be Mormon in your bedroom, necessarily, certainly the church wouldn't say so.
Speaker 3:
[80:44] Sure, sure.
Speaker 2:
[80:45] They would look at it and go, no, you can't be Mormon in your bedroom. You need to be Mormon through the processes of the church.
Speaker 3:
[80:52] I see, I see.
Speaker 1:
[80:54] So yeah, when did your YouTube channel start exploring other religions or churches? How long ago?
Speaker 3:
[81:02] I've only been doing this for a couple of years. And I think it was like that initial sense and desire that I had to better understand religious communities around me so that I could preach the gospel to them. I think that just kind of morphed into a general curiosity about people and trying to better understand them in their own terms.
Speaker 1:
[81:21] Did you have a day job before?
Speaker 3:
[81:24] Yeah, yeah. So I still have that day job. You know, I'm still working nine to five.
Speaker 1:
[81:31] Do you say what it is, your job?
Speaker 3:
[81:32] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a videographer.
Speaker 1:
[81:34] Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:
[81:35] Or a video producer. So I.
Speaker 1:
[81:38] Because your videos are well edited. Thank you.
Speaker 3:
[81:42] Shout out to my editor, Jake. Jake Sandvik, incredible, incredible human being. He's been working with me for the past six months and has made my videos substantially better and much funnier. But yeah, so I edit videos and then shoot videos for commercial corporate crap.
Speaker 1:
[81:59] Okay. So this is a side gig. It's not your main gig.
Speaker 3:
[82:02] Yeah. For now, fingers crossed someday.
Speaker 1:
[82:04] You're trying to move it towards a full-time gig?
Speaker 3:
[82:06] I would love that.
Speaker 1:
[82:07] Oh, cool. Okay. Okay. So we started by you talking about some of the churches you've explored. Let's just dive in for the next, I don't know, 30 minutes and talk about what you've observed about Mormons and ex-Mormons and Mormonism. And then also you can ask us any questions.
Speaker 3:
[82:25] For sure. For sure.
Speaker 1:
[82:26] So how did you start getting interested in Mormons?
Speaker 3:
[82:29] Well, I mean, my whole thing is I want to see it all, right? And for now, at least, I've kind of kept it to the scope of Christianity. And it's like, yeah, you got to visit the Christian scientists. You got to visit the Jehovah's Witnesses. And you got to visit the Mormons. So my first visit to...
Speaker 1:
[82:46] So you consider Mormons Christian. I think that's a hot take.
Speaker 3:
[82:51] Like, yes and no. And I mean, I'm a myriological nihilist, for those who care what that term means. But... What does it mean? So myriology is the study of like categories. And so like, how many colors are there between the color blue and red? Like that's a myriological question. Where does the ocean become the sea? That's a myriological question. And so like the category of Christian, I think it depends on who you ask, right? I don't think that there's some ontological answer to that question or some, you know, definition written in the stars. So if you ask a Nicene Christian, usually they're going to say that Mormons aren't Christian. If you ask a sociologist, they're usually going to say, yeah, they're Christian in that they are building off of the capital provided to them by the Old and New Testaments. If you ask a Mormon, they're going to say yes in a heartbeat. So, you know, it's a tricky thing. But yeah, I knew that I wanted to visit a ward really early on. And one of the first times I ever did that was I went to a Fast and Testimony Sunday, and I was...
Speaker 1:
[84:01] In North Carolina?
Speaker 3:
[84:02] In North Carolina, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[84:03] That is deep-ending it.
Speaker 3:
[84:05] Yeah. Wait, it's what?
Speaker 2:
[84:06] That's going in at the deep end.
Speaker 3:
[84:08] Yeah, it was. So I went and I was pretty appalled, and it's one of the few times that I really blasted a church and just told them, like, guys, what is going on here? Everyone was so sad and so miserable to be there, and it just broke my brain that these people just clearly did not want to be there.
Speaker 2:
[84:36] There's a big sense of duty in Mormonism.
Speaker 3:
[84:38] Yeah. And I think that, like, yeah, like, I was kind of dealing with a little bit of cognitive dissonance because, like, I've got, you know, I had some Mormon friends growing up, and it's like, how are these people who are so smiley and happy on the outside? How are they, how is there a congregation of them that is this morose on a Sunday morning? So that was the first time that I went to a ward. The second time.
Speaker 1:
[85:05] Did you find testimony meeting to be interesting?
Speaker 3:
[85:09] Well, not as interesting as I would have hoped. I mean, it was kind of just a lot of, you know, tired young parents kind of complaining. They're like, yeah, well, you know, dog died this week and Bishop said he was gonna call us. He forgot, and I say this in the name of Jesus Christ. It was like comedic. It was so bad.
Speaker 1:
[85:31] Oh, man.
Speaker 3:
[85:33] And so, you know, I blasted them for that. And then a few months later, I went to a young adult ward.
Speaker 2:
[85:38] And how did you decide to go back? Why did you decide to give Mormonism another go?
Speaker 1:
[85:41] Oh, it's his job, Nemo.
Speaker 2:
[85:43] Yeah, but even if there's another church you could have gone to, right?
Speaker 3:
[85:46] I mean, I think the Mormons are robust and complicated enough to warrant more than one visit.
Speaker 1:
[85:52] At least two visits. Yeah. So it's a young adult, single adult.
Speaker 3:
[85:56] Yeah, I went to a young adult ward and had a blast. Like genuinely had so much fun. I think I spent five hours there because like, you know, stayed for the sacrament and then just was hanging out with some kids afterwards. And like we were vibing for hours and hours.
Speaker 1:
[86:11] Are you single or? Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:
[86:14] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[86:14] So you're scoping out the scene.
Speaker 3:
[86:15] No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:
[86:17] Well, what do you mean no?
Speaker 3:
[86:20] I, oh man, yeah, I feel like I would shipwreck a young Mormon gal's faith very quickly.
Speaker 2:
[86:27] We're going to get him on mutual, John.
Speaker 1:
[86:29] I don't know, man, or she would convert you very quickly.
Speaker 3:
[86:31] Hey, shoot your shot, man.
Speaker 1:
[86:32] Have you ever heard of flirt to convert? That's a thing, bro.
Speaker 3:
[86:35] That is a thing. I mean, listen, if there's any women of the Mormon variety who want to shoot their shot, take a stab at it, slide in my DMs, please, dab. It's all downhill from here. Am I blushing?
Speaker 1:
[86:53] I know there's some Mormon women out there going, challenge accepted.
Speaker 2:
[86:57] There's no woman out of you yet.
Speaker 3:
[86:59] Terrifying.
Speaker 1:
[87:00] It's happened to others. So anyway, so you went to a young single adult in UNC Chapel Hill slash Raleigh Durham area?
Speaker 3:
[87:09] Somewhere around there, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[87:11] And you found the kids to be what?
Speaker 3:
[87:13] Oh, I mean, they were sociable, they were friendly and kind and gracious. Like I had a blast with them.
Speaker 1:
[87:20] Naive, intelligent.
Speaker 3:
[87:21] No, I would say that they were one of my homies there and we're still friends, like stupid smart. I mean, like insanely well read with like the Enlightenment thinkers and you know, it was just, yeah, like impressively intelligent. I mean, you know, was not a, you know, didn't have his head in the sand. He wasn't really so much in the, you know, Mormon apologetic scene. He was just kind of intelligent and appreciated his own faith.
Speaker 1:
[87:51] That's because you know where that leads.
Speaker 3:
[87:53] The apologetics.
Speaker 1:
[87:54] Yeah. It leads out of Mormonism.
Speaker 3:
[87:56] Yeah. I mean, you know, it's.
Speaker 1:
[87:59] Not always, but.
Speaker 3:
[88:00] Well, I think apologetics in any sphere, you know, candidly, I think it forces you to examine a way, examine religion in a way that it's not meant to be examined.
Speaker 1:
[88:10] Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 3:
[88:11] No.
Speaker 1:
[88:11] Yeah, because it's using tools for a different, I don't know, empirical or epistemological kind of paradigm, right?
Speaker 3:
[88:18] Yeah. Yeah. And so I don't know. I hope that's not ungeritable.
Speaker 1:
[88:23] So you met these young Mormon adults, had a great time with them. Found them to be enjoyable to be around. Did you feel like I'm with a bunch of cult members or did you feel like I'm with a bunch of really cool young adults?
Speaker 3:
[88:34] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in that moment, it felt like, yeah, these are, you know, just like any other, you know, Sunday school kids, right?
Speaker 1:
[88:41] And just a little nicer, a little smarter, a little more friendly.
Speaker 3:
[88:45] I'd say so.
Speaker 1:
[88:46] Yeah. A little more clean cut. Yeah. See?
Speaker 2:
[88:49] And then speaking of the Mormons here, we're pretty cool.
Speaker 3:
[88:53] And then, you know, my most recent foray into the LDS world is I got to go on a big Mormon cruise as I branded it.
Speaker 1:
[89:01] Did someone reach out to you at that point?
Speaker 3:
[89:02] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[89:03] So before that, you read the entire Book of Mormon. Let's not forget that.
Speaker 1:
[89:06] How'd that happen?
Speaker 3:
[89:06] Thank you. Well, so it was just like, you know, I've met with probably 10 missionaries over the years and just, you know, trying to better understand like, wait, what is the sales pitch? Like, what is the theology? What's happening here? And so, you know, they would always ask me like, well, just read this one or two verses in Second Nephi. And I was like, I just, it bugs me because, you know, I'm not a Mormon, right? I'm a Nevemo. And on the outside, it's like, you hear all this hubbub about, you know, the critics would say like, this silly story of Joseph finding these, you know, BS plates out in the woods and translating them into a hat. And, and, you know, I know, I knew about the polygamy. I knew about the, you know, him marrying very young women. Like, I knew all of that. What I didn't know is like, what the hell is in the book? And so I was like, I need to actually sit down and read this because I feel like that's the one thing that nobody ever talks about. And so when I finally sat down and read the whole thing, my big takeaway was like, hey, I candidly, you know, as somebody who reads a lot of, you know, other scriptures, I think that this is probably, unfortunately, the worst religious text that I've ever read. The worst religious primary text.
Speaker 1:
[90:25] You found the Book of Mormon to be what?
Speaker 3:
[90:27] Boring.
Speaker 1:
[90:28] What about sometimes inspiring or sometimes interesting? Or no? I mean, it's got a lot. It's like at worst, it's Bible Jesus fan fiction, right?
Speaker 3:
[90:39] Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[90:40] So there's got to be some interesting or good about it.
Speaker 3:
[90:43] Sure, sure. I mean, it's been a few months since I've read it, and it already is evading me the most interesting parts. So credit where credit's due, I need to go back and read it, maybe with a missionary and really parse through it properly to get the best I can out of it. But I read a lot of the Gnostic Gospels. I've read the Koran. I'm slowly making my way through Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures and Mary Baker Eddy.
Speaker 1:
[91:13] You're saying the Book of Mormon is more boring than the Koran?
Speaker 3:
[91:15] Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[91:17] Did you hear that? Yeah, I heard that. That's rude.
Speaker 3:
[91:19] I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:
[91:20] That's some shade, isn't it? Kind of shade on the Book of Mormon.
Speaker 1:
[91:22] You know what Mark Twain said about the Book of Mormon?
Speaker 3:
[91:24] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[91:24] You do? Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:
[91:25] Chloroform and print.
Speaker 2:
[91:27] And do you find that to be an accurate description?
Speaker 3:
[91:30] Yeah. And I don't think-
Speaker 1:
[91:32] Were there parts that inspired you?
Speaker 2:
[91:34] What about the war chapters, like lopping off arms and stuff?
Speaker 3:
[91:38] I don't know. It just kind of sounded like white noise to me. Now, again, again, I've got a reading disability. I'm not very smart. The King Jamesian English may have thrown me for a loop. So take it all with a grain of salt.
Speaker 1:
[91:48] You know, the Book of Mormon says you have to read with real intent.
Speaker 2:
[91:53] Do you feel like you had real intent, Jared?
Speaker 1:
[91:55] I don't think you did, Nemo.
Speaker 3:
[91:56] You got me.
Speaker 2:
[91:57] I don't think so.
Speaker 3:
[91:58] So there you go.
Speaker 2:
[91:59] Checkmate atheists.
Speaker 1:
[92:01] I think he brought a cynical, cold, negative heart to his reading of the Book of Mormon.
Speaker 3:
[92:07] And to those people, it's like, at least I read it, man. You know, half of the people, half of the, what are they called? Investigators that you meet with?
Speaker 2:
[92:14] I'm sorry, they call them friends now, but yeah. They call them friends now.
Speaker 3:
[92:17] Really?
Speaker 2:
[92:18] Yeah, rather than investigators. Sounds a bit-
Speaker 1:
[92:21] I don't think that's gonna hold, Nemo.
Speaker 2:
[92:23] I don't think so, but that's what they call them.
Speaker 3:
[92:25] That's a little funky.
Speaker 2:
[92:26] But I would say there are members, candidly there are members of the church who haven't read the entire Book of Mormon.
Speaker 3:
[92:31] Right, oh, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:
[92:31] It's a rite of passage within the church. It's something people proudly do, and a lot of people do do it, but there are members of the church who haven't read it.
Speaker 3:
[92:38] Same with Protestant Christians, right? I mean, the vast majority have never read the Bible cover to cover.
Speaker 1:
[92:43] So did you do an episode about reading the Book of Mormon?
Speaker 3:
[92:46] Yeah. For better or worse? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[92:48] What was it about?
Speaker 3:
[92:50] So it was just called, I'm an Atheist, I Read the Entire Book of Mormon. It's my most viral video, unsurprisingly.
Speaker 1:
[92:56] Oh really? And your basic summary was it was boring? That was your main take?
Speaker 3:
[92:59] It was boring and then I was actually actively upset with Jesus' appearance in 4th Nephi.
Speaker 1:
[93:05] Why? Because he doesn't do more Jesus.
Speaker 3:
[93:07] He doesn't do anything. It's not more Jesus. Yes he does.
Speaker 1:
[93:09] That's the problem.
Speaker 3:
[93:10] No, it's another testament.
Speaker 1:
[93:11] He heals people.
Speaker 3:
[93:13] Not in any meaningful way.
Speaker 1:
[93:14] He blesses children.
Speaker 3:
[93:15] No, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:
[93:16] You didn't read it.
Speaker 3:
[93:17] I did.
Speaker 1:
[93:18] No, you didn't. I did. He causes a big earthquake and thousands of people die.
Speaker 2:
[93:22] Whole city disappears. Volcanoes. No archaeological evidence anymore.
Speaker 1:
[93:24] Volcanoes and earthquakes and lava. And I think screaming people like he did all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2:
[93:32] There he called three immortal men. I mean, he called 12 disciples and three of them are still alive.
Speaker 1:
[93:37] He called 12 apostles. You didn't read it. Nehema, I'm telling him, he didn't read it. No, I'm teasing you. I'm teasing you.
Speaker 3:
[93:43] No, no, no, no. I mean, like, no, no.
Speaker 2:
[93:45] Tell us your point about how Jesus didn't do anything, because I am genuinely curious.
Speaker 3:
[93:48] Because like Book of Mormon Jesus, we see it in the Gnostic Gospels. Right. It's the same thing. It's Jesus fan fiction. And Jesus does these insane miracles that are just so otherworldly that, you know, it's like these stories are not in the New Testament. They're not in Paul. But it's stories of like Jesus, you know, making clay pigeons by the by the by the riverbed and like blowing on them and they come to life as real birds. It's so magical. Or you have like the story. Oh, man, I forget which gospel it's in. But, you know, there's a story of Jesus. He's playing on a rooftop with some other kids. And one of the kids falls off the roof and dies. And so, you know, everyone in the city comes and they huddle around the kid. And they're like, oh my gosh, like, how did this happen? And so Mother Mary comes and she's like, Jesus, did you push this kid? Did you kill him? And Jesus is like, no, mom, I didn't, I didn't do that. And she's like, Jesus? And he's like, oh, he rolls his eyes. He grabs the kid, raises him from the dead, and he's like, Billy, did I kill you? And he's like, uh-uh, it wasn't you. And he's like, see? So he raises a kid from the dead just to vindicate himself of a murder charge. It's crazy, there's nothing like that in the Book of Mormon.
Speaker 2:
[95:06] Jesus turns up and does the Sermon on the Mount again.
Speaker 3:
[95:08] Yes, it's literally copied and pasted.
Speaker 1:
[95:10] I seriously think you or we need to have him back on and read the story of Ammon. Yeah, sure. And see if he finds the story of Ammon interesting. Or the story of Korahor, right? I can guarantee you we can pick five stories of the Book of Mormon that you will find fascinating.
Speaker 3:
[95:25] I would sincerely love that.
Speaker 1:
[95:26] Don't you think, Nemo?
Speaker 2:
[95:27] Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 3:
[95:28] Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:
[95:29] Nemo and John defend that there are parts of the Book of Mormon that are interesting and even enlightening. You heard it first here on Mormon Stories.
Speaker 3:
[95:38] Beautiful. I would love to have my mind changed. Because 16 million people say that it's the most beautiful book ever written.
Speaker 1:
[95:45] It's probably like a million who say that.
Speaker 2:
[95:46] Yeah. Do you think it's that low?
Speaker 1:
[95:50] Well, like two-thirds of the people ever baptized Mormon are no longer attending church. And then of the five or four million who are still active...
Speaker 2:
[95:57] How many of them would actually say it's the most beautiful?
Speaker 1:
[95:58] A bunch of those are kids or haven't fully read the book. It's only like a third of the four million that are really devout, I'd say.
Speaker 2:
[96:05] It's a third of the third that are like, wow.
Speaker 1:
[96:08] Yeah, yeah. But, you know, that third is pretty devout and committed. Okay, so you read the Book of Mormon, thought it was boring, did a thing with Nemo, and then-
Speaker 2:
[96:19] Because I corrected them on a few things.
Speaker 3:
[96:20] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[96:21] Did you do the thing with Nemo before you got invited on the cruise?
Speaker 3:
[96:23] Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[96:24] Okay. So basically, Jacob Hansen was trolling Nemo the Mormon, and then reached out and said, I'll bring this guy on a cruise.
Speaker 3:
[96:31] Well, so I met Jacob Hansen at Ruslan's Bless God Summit. Ruslan KD is one of the biggest evangelical YouTubers and he's a homie of mine. And so when I was out there at his conference, I ran into Jacob Hansen. I knew who he was. We got along well. And so he invited me onto this Mormon cruise, right? And he very graciously forwent his honorarium for, you know, his speaking fee for that cruise in order to bring along a buddy.
Speaker 1:
[97:01] You know why he had to do that, right?
Speaker 3:
[97:02] Why?
Speaker 1:
[97:03] Because he's on record of chastising ex-Mormons for making any money at all. So he had to find a way to transfer that money somewhere. So he wouldn't be made a hippie. I'm totally kidding.
Speaker 2:
[97:15] There is a Facebook post of him mocking Al Carraway for going on a cruise and saying, I don't like when people monetize their Mormon fame. And then a year later, he goes...
Speaker 1:
[97:22] Mormon's called a priestcraft. Mormon's called a priestcraft.
Speaker 2:
[97:24] A year later, he goes on a priest himself.
Speaker 3:
[97:25] I think I asked him about it and I think he said like, I don't know, man, I changed my mind.
Speaker 1:
[97:29] No, I'm teasing. I think he wanted you there and thought it would be good for everyone to have you go. I'm totally joking.
Speaker 3:
[97:34] I'm so grateful I went because out of all of the experiences that I've had of getting to explore Mormonism and Latter-day Saints, that was by far the most enlightening.
Speaker 1:
[97:44] All right, time for a fighting round. You ready?
Speaker 3:
[97:46] Hit me.
Speaker 1:
[97:46] Okay, so a couple of sentences on Jacob Hansen, your reactions about him as a person go. And there are gonna be others. So this is the first one.
Speaker 3:
[97:57] He's a fighter, right? And so, you know, online, he's...
Speaker 1:
[98:02] Pugilistic.
Speaker 3:
[98:04] I don't want to comment on his online stuff. I'm trying my best to avoid, you know, YouTube drama the best I can, you know, in person. I love him.
Speaker 1:
[98:14] Right? You love him? Yeah. What are the three things you love about Jacob Hansen? In person.
Speaker 3:
[98:19] In person. You know, he was gracious. He loves his wife, loves his wife and kids. When we were in Mexico, he, there was a 80 year old widow who was on board and he, you know, was going to go like, you know, hop on a sailboat and float around the island. But he was like, oh, like Martha, you don't have any London like hang out with today? Come on, let's like, you know, walk you ashore.
Speaker 1:
[98:45] That's nice.
Speaker 3:
[98:46] It was really gracious. And I'm blanking on a third, but like, So loves his wife, nice to widows.
Speaker 1:
[98:52] That's not bad.
Speaker 3:
[98:53] Not bad. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[98:54] That's good. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[98:59] Jasmine Rapley spoke with her very little.
Speaker 1:
[99:03] Okay. Not much to say. Greg Mattson.
Speaker 3:
[99:06] I ran into him at the gym and, you know, in between both of us trying to, you know, get as swole as we could, as alpha as we were talking a little bit. And yeah, what do you like about Greg? Oh, here's the thing. I have watched very little of these people's content online. I have a very unique window and a very unique purview on who they are as people, because with most of them, I haven't watched their content, and that's a super important disclaimer. So I'll say a lot of nice things about, you know, some of these people online or, you know, who they are in person, and then kind of recoil and maybe wince a little bit when I see some of the stuff that they post about. And with some of them, again, I want to keep this off the record, but with some of them, I've talked to them about it and, you know, pulled them aside off the scenes or called them up and said, hey man, like, you made this post and said these things or made these apologetic points, that kind of made me uncomfortable. And I think to me, that's much more important than, you know, like making a take down piece of, you know, like, because I could do that all day with every YouTube ever, ever, ever. And anyone could do that with me, right? Because I've, God, I'm an idiot.
Speaker 1:
[100:18] So anything, any reactions to Cardinalis or the stick of Joseph Broz?
Speaker 3:
[100:25] I don't, I don't want to say, you know.
Speaker 1:
[100:27] Okay. No, I'm not looking for dirt. I'm just saying.
Speaker 3:
[100:29] No, I mean, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[100:32] No, that's good. Did you get a sense for any of the apologetic, Mormon apologetic arguments they were making either on the cruise or at all? How would you or would you not compare Mormon apologetics to traditional Christian apologetics? Or do you even have a take on that?
Speaker 3:
[100:53] Yeah. It's interesting, right? I mean, sometimes it can feel a little speculative.
Speaker 1:
[101:00] Mormon apologetics.
Speaker 3:
[101:01] Mormon apologetics, yeah. And I can kind of like look at it and say like, yeah, I don't know how to disprove this or that claim, but I've kind of been around the block with other religious denominations and organizations to kind of know how these arguments look and sound and feel and say like, yeah, if I had to guess, I don't think that this holds weight or would hold weight if I were to investigate it more thoroughly.
Speaker 1:
[101:33] What are the top three to five Mormon truth claims that you think are least believable or of most concern to you? Do you want to say or do you don't want to say?
Speaker 3:
[101:44] I probably don't want to say.
Speaker 1:
[101:45] Okay, that's fair. That'll make this shorter.
Speaker 3:
[101:49] Okay, I kind of wanted to maybe rather than talk about, you know, the Mormon truth claims, right? Because, spoiler alert, I don't think Joseph Smith was a prophet. I don't think he discovered, you know, the true testament of Jesus Christ scribbled on golden plates. Like, I don't think that's a shocker to anyone. I'm shook. Personally terrified in the corner. I don't know. It's like, I don't think that anyone is going to be shocked or amazed by that. I think that I'm more interested in the heart of Mormonism and, you know, like, how Mormonism feels and sees itself.
Speaker 1:
[102:27] I love that. How does it feel? How does Mormonism feel to you? How do you perceive the heart of Mormonism?
Speaker 3:
[102:33] Yeah, yeah. It's very family-centric, for better or worse. Maybe even more family-centric than God-centric. And I think that that's fascinating. So, you know, like recently, there was a friend of mine named Tham on the Inspiring Philosophy channel. He made a whole video saying that Mormons are actually atheists, or they believe in a type of atheism, because, you know, God the Father and Jesus Christ are not the omni-gods of classical theism. And I think to, you know, to push back against Tham's point, it's probably an overstatement, right? It's because then you would also have to say that like the pantheons of Greece and Rome, because none of those gods are like, you know, I don't think they would say Zeus is like omnipotent. And so you would have to say like, well, are they atheistic as well? But so I do think that that's a huge deal, right? Like how the idea of a lack of true monotheism plays into the soul of Mormonism. I'm way more interested about that. And the way that Jesus Christ plays into that. Because to kind of jump the gun a little bit, do you, you know, I was talking about my relationship with this kind of transcendence experience of Jesus at the beginning. And it sounds like that doesn't resonate with y'all. That doesn't click in the same way that it does for me. In my mind, insofar as I've heard it, and I would love to be corrected, Jesus almost feels relegated to the role of like a big brother in Mormonism. You know, he's like, he's like a wise guru who's trying to take you to the next level. But he's not the originator of the cosmos itself. He's not the grounds of being. He's not the great I am in some, you know, ineffable metaphysical sense. It feels like he's just the guy who's done it better than us and did it before us.
Speaker 2:
[104:38] Well, yeah, because it's the non-trinitarian view. So you've got God the Father for all that other stuff.
Speaker 1:
[104:44] Well, maybe I would love to give my answer to that, if that's a question, and then let Nemo, Nemo may see things differently. For me, I would say you did not characterize how I internalized Jesus as a Mormon. So as a Mormon, Elohim, you're right. God the Father in Mormonism probably had a God and was once like us and then worked up through the ranks of being a really good human and then became exalted and then became a God. So in that sense, Elohim, you know, was the child of a God and a grandson of a God. But Mormons believe that Jesus is the God of the Old Testament. So all of that Old Testament stuff with miracles and with all the, you know, all the things that happened in the Old Testament, for a Mormon, Jesus did that, not God.
Speaker 3:
[105:38] Really?
Speaker 1:
[105:39] Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:
[105:40] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[105:41] So in fact, Jesus created the earth. So God's up there in heaven sort of overseeing it, but it's Jesus, Son of God, also God, you should understand that idea, who's actually creating the earth. So, yeah, Jesus is big G God for me. And then, you know, in the Doctrine and Covenants, all the revelations Joseph's receiving, he's receiving that from Jesus, Jehovah, not from God the Father. So Jesus is the one giving us our revelations. Jesus is the one who died for us on the cross. Jesus bled from every poor, suffered for every sin mankind ever committed, and then resurrected, and now is taking his place as sort of the god of this earth. So no, no, no. Now, I would say my reaction to what you just said is that as Mormons in the past 10 years have needed to pivot because of the bad, because of the problems the internet has posed to Mormon history, doctrine, and theology, and all the antagonism the Mormon Church has experienced from evangelicals, the Church has chosen to pivot more towards a flavor of evangelical Christianity. And in that sense, just in the past 10 years, they've really started playing up Jesus being, being, Jesus being more the elder brother, you know, more traditional Christianity in that sense.
Speaker 3:
[107:10] Well, I think the thing that I'm getting at is the idea of celestial progression, right? The idea that, you know, God within Mormonism was and not a, what do they call it? The, you know, as God now is, so once was man. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[107:28] Or as man now is, God once was, as God now is, man may be.
Speaker 3:
[107:32] Yes. What is that couplet called?
Speaker 2:
[107:34] It's what you talk about. Day of Decay.
Speaker 3:
[107:36] Right.
Speaker 1:
[107:37] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[107:37] Yes. Yes. Day of Decay.
Speaker 3:
[107:39] But so, I mean, the idea that God is not innately transcendent or divine, but, you know, he's at some level, like he was a dude from some other universe who became a God, right?
Speaker 1:
[107:52] I just say the same brain of yours, they can see God and Jesus as the same, but different, divine, but human. I think that same brain could wrap its brain around God being supreme and the Father, but Jesus also being supreme, but also being the Son. I would think you could wrap your brain around that just as easily as you could the Trinity.
Speaker 3:
[108:14] Well, I think the thing for me is imagining within Orthodox Mormon thought, I could through the sacraments and the endowment, attain a level of divinity identical to Elohim someday, right?
Speaker 1:
[108:32] It's a feature, not a bud, brother.
Speaker 3:
[108:33] Right, right.
Speaker 2:
[108:34] That's the USP.
Speaker 3:
[108:35] But it seems like, because in my formerly Protestant brain, it's like, doesn't that belittle God?
Speaker 1:
[108:44] No, it means he's generous. He's so generous, he wants us to partake of all that he has.
Speaker 3:
[108:48] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[108:49] I think CS. Lewis vibed around these ideas.
Speaker 3:
[108:52] Really?
Speaker 2:
[108:52] That's why he gets quoted so much.
Speaker 1:
[108:53] Yeah, Mormons love to quote. CS. Lewis has quoted more than most Mormon general authorities.
Speaker 2:
[108:58] They call him the 13th apostle.
Speaker 1:
[109:00] Often because he agrees with our theology. Fair enough, fair enough. But CS. Lewis always talked about humans being gods and embryo. And anyway, no, I think you can believe that God is super G and that we can become super G's too.
Speaker 2:
[109:16] What you're getting at there is there's a difference then with the relationship between, because you're loving a being that is something you can never attain, and so fills a sort of gap there. Whereas what you're seeing is that we're worshipping essentially gods that are something that we could then become. So it's less that we're worshipping them for their supreme nature that we can never attain and more that we're trying to be like them. Yeah, yeah, that creates a different relationship. You're trying to, we're trying to emulate or work towards being able to emulate, very specifically, the nature of God. Whereas you're trying to have a relationship with a being that fills in gaps that you can't attain because you don't believe that you can actually become like him. You want to be loved by him, you want to be with him, you want to be close to him, you can't become him. Whereas if you believe you could become something like that, that's going to change the relationship to it.
Speaker 3:
[110:06] Sure, sure. I mean, that's like my theological brain is like, you know, pouring smoke out of my ears right now trying to trying to distill this down. I mean, so here's a theological conundrum, right? This is called the youth or fraud dilemma is goodness, is something good because God decrees arbitrarily that it's good or is it good? And then God just retroactively identifies it as such.
Speaker 2:
[110:43] Is it good or is it good because it's characterized as such by God?
Speaker 3:
[110:46] Right, right. And the classical theistic answer to that question is God is goodness himself. God is perfection itself. And so to my mind, it's like, okay, well, you know, in the great pantheon of Mormon gods and gods in progress, it's like they're all attaining to this goodness. But like, what the hell is goodness? You know what I mean? Like, like, what is this standard of, of, you know, of perfection or near perfection that they're trying to attain to? If there's like, is there a law above all of the gods?
Speaker 2:
[111:23] Well, yeah, because there's, there's ideas of the Mormonism that God is bound by certain eternal laws, right? When we do what he asks, then he's bound to bless us and things like that. So that then creates a problem with God's omnipotence because God isn't actually that omnipotent. He's fairly limited.
Speaker 1:
[111:35] That's where the idea of a small G God versus a big G God comes from, right?
Speaker 3:
[111:38] Right, right.
Speaker 1:
[111:39] Can I blow your mind for just one second? Hit me. So you're reminding me of this. One of my first video interviews ever was with a woman named Anne Wilde. She was raised Orthodox traditional Mormon, learned about Joseph Smith, the Brigham Young's polygamy, and realized, whoa, the true Mormonism practices polygamy. So she divorced her Mormon husband so she could marry a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist named Ogden Crout. And she became his third wife and spent the rest of her life publishing his revelations and his books and his scripture.
Speaker 3:
[112:10] What is this group called?
Speaker 1:
[112:12] There's all sorts of offshoot fundamentalist Mormon polygamists. He was an independent Mormon fundamentalist polygamist. But I was talking to her about that. I'm like, well, now he has to divide his love up into three.
Speaker 3:
[112:26] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[112:27] How can he love you? He can only love a third of you or love you a third as well. And she would say to me, no, grasshopper, you don't understand. Like polygamy amplifies love. You learn true sacrifice and true empathy. And polygamous people are able to love exponentially more than you monogamous. And it's the same type of vibe where we could just as easily say to you, you just have limited thinking. You know, your views of God are just simplistic. You monogamous, you monotheists, which I know you're an atheist, but like your monotheist brain is limiting. The glory and the majesty of God, because a real God would want his children to achieve all of the majesty that he achieved. You know, it's not philosophically, I don't think any of it makes sense. So like, for you to pretend that, you know, you just take that position of like, well, that doesn't make total philosophical sense. You don't even believe it, right?
Speaker 3:
[113:27] You're not wrong, you're not wrong.
Speaker 2:
[113:28] And the problem with the problem with limiting God's power and making him non-unimpedant, as some apologists do, is it makes the problem of evil worse, not better. Because all of a sudden, you're like, right, okay, so we've got a God that's actually just powered us to stop evil. So then at what point, why we worship him at that point? Because he kind of becomes useless in that respect, if you can't even stop suffering, or if you can, but only at specific times when he chooses to, because then you have to question his choices.
Speaker 3:
[113:52] 100%.
Speaker 1:
[113:53] So I feel super bad because I can't go long today. Normally we do three, four, five hours, but any other big questions you have just really quickly. And then what we'll do is we'll have a follow-up collab with you, me, and Nemo.
Speaker 3:
[114:07] Sure, sure.
Speaker 1:
[114:07] And we can, at least one episode is gonna be John and Nemo try and convince Jared Smith that there are interesting and even inspiring parts of the Book of Mormon.
Speaker 3:
[114:18] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[114:18] All right, are you up for that?
Speaker 3:
[114:20] Sign me up for it.
Speaker 1:
[114:20] Nemo, you up for that?
Speaker 2:
[114:21] I'm absolutely up for that.
Speaker 1:
[114:22] Okay, and then we can have another episode at least where you hit us with your hardest questions.
Speaker 2:
[114:26] 100%.
Speaker 1:
[114:27] And we take all the time that we have to convince you why Mormonism is the best of all false churches.
Speaker 3:
[114:33] I feel so bad because I feel like I spent this whole time blabbing about myself. I was hoping to...
Speaker 1:
[114:38] I did this, I did this. No. I like to hear people's stories. I'm bored of talking about Mormonism.
Speaker 2:
[114:43] It's called Mormon Stories for a reason. He's never gonna let you get away with it.
Speaker 3:
[114:46] But I'm not a Mormon.
Speaker 1:
[114:47] Give us a question. You got a question or two?
Speaker 3:
[114:49] No, I was just gonna say, I feel bad because part of my desire to be here was to kind of give the exmos a chance to kind of correct my record, right? I feel like I've thrown a lot of gracious flowers to active believing Latter-day Saints. And it's like, hey, y'all, I want to extend that same courtesy to people who have been burned by Mormonism. And so I guess my apologies that...
Speaker 1:
[115:14] No, let's do this. So we'll have our viewers and listeners watch your episode with Jacob, your episode with Nemo, and any other episodes you recommend that they prep should then do a live stream with you, me, and Nemo where we can have that intense conversation you want to have.
Speaker 3:
[115:34] Sure, sure.
Speaker 1:
[115:34] How do we do that? What videos should they watch besides the ones I mentioned?
Speaker 3:
[115:40] Other than those, I would say my first video on the Latter-day Saints, which is just called This Mormon Church Sucked. It's got a thumbnail of me going like, ah, I think that that's probably a good place to start, and then you can see my evolution of thought. But I still feel like I'm playing softball a little bit. I feel like I haven't really slammed the gavel down at any point yet, and I feel kind of guilty.
Speaker 2:
[116:04] Do you feel like you have to?
Speaker 3:
[116:07] I just don't want to feel like I'm giving anyone a pass.
Speaker 1:
[116:12] I mean, I'm inspired and intrigued by this idea that you don't want to tell people why you lost your Christian faith, and you don't want to talk dirt on any of the lovely Mormon apologists you've met. There's something really anti-YouTube about that that I love, because I actually see social media as being such a problem with mental health and polarization and conflict in society. So I find some of your approaches unheard of and deeply refreshing, honestly.
Speaker 3:
[116:47] I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1:
[116:48] Yeah. And you still come across as funny and entertaining in your episodes.
Speaker 3:
[116:53] I'm trying my darndest, man.
Speaker 1:
[116:55] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[116:55] That's the secret.
Speaker 1:
[116:56] So I'm curious what type of conversations you would want to have, given that you firewall drama of attacking people, and you firewall wanting to...
Speaker 2:
[117:05] He gets us to attack them for him. That's what he does. So he asks us, and then we get frustrated, and we put it out there. And he's like, I'm just listening.
Speaker 3:
[117:14] I mean, a little bit. Yeah. I mean, okay. No, but I mean, I want to give you guys the opportunity to speak your piece, right? And it's your Mormon story to tell, right?
Speaker 1:
[117:26] All right. All right. So let's plan a couple episodes.
Speaker 3:
[117:30] Sure.
Speaker 1:
[117:30] Because, you know, maybe that'll be good. We'll have this conversation be a bit of a series and we'll provide some great content for people and not try and do it all in a three to four to five hour episode like I normally do.
Speaker 3:
[117:41] For sure. For sure.
Speaker 1:
[117:42] Any final words you want to say about Mormons or believing Mormons or apologetic Mormons or ex-Mormons? Any final Mormon testimonies you want to share?
Speaker 3:
[117:58] Mormons just have better hair than the rest of the Christian world. I'm panicking. I'm floundering over here. I mean, that's pretty good.
Speaker 1:
[118:10] We said we have good we have we value families.
Speaker 3:
[118:13] Yeah, no, that you guys do really enjoy family.
Speaker 1:
[118:15] Yeah, I think that's I think family might be the most important thing. I just went to a funeral today. Bill Bradshaw, former guest on Mormon Stories and my research collaborator. And he had such a beautiful family. And I think if you're going to do one thing right as a religion or a church, have it be families. Now, having said that, there's a lot of my viewers and listeners that are going to say the Mormon Church destroys families. So it's complicated.
Speaker 3:
[118:43] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[118:43] But a Mormon family can be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.
Speaker 3:
[118:48] 100%.
Speaker 2:
[118:49] Yeah. You agree with that?
Speaker 3:
[118:51] I'm sorry for your loss, by the way.
Speaker 1:
[118:52] Oh, well, more his family, but he was a great guy. Bill Bradshaw, go watch that episode, everybody. We just re-released it last week. Great guy. Anyway, well, fun. Well, Jared Smith, it's fun to get to know you a bit. Tell us again.
Speaker 3:
[119:08] Likewise.
Speaker 1:
[119:08] Number one, the name of your channel and number two, how people can donate or support you.
Speaker 3:
[119:12] Sure, sure. The name of my channel is Heliocentric. My series is called Atheist Church Audit. If you just punch that in, you'll see a bunch of thumbnails of me making really dopey faces. And then if anyone feels compelled to help support my stupid mission of visiting fun churches and weird religious sects, patreon.com/heliocentric is probably the best place where they could do that.
Speaker 1:
[119:38] Donate to Jared so he can attack Scientologists and pay his legal bills when he does. Did I get that right?
Speaker 2:
[119:47] I think that was the entire purpose of this episode, I think was to get him enough money to take down Scientology.
Speaker 1:
[119:52] And pay the bills of doing so. Beautiful. Thanks for coming all the way here. Did you come here for this or for something else?
Speaker 3:
[119:58] I mean, it was this.
Speaker 1:
[120:00] We've got a temple endowment. I'm sorry, no. Oh, no, temple open house. My apologies.
Speaker 2:
[120:04] You went to the temple.
Speaker 1:
[120:05] We went to the temple this morning. I'm sorry, we didn't get to talk about that.
Speaker 2:
[120:08] What'd you think overall? S tier, A, B?
Speaker 1:
[120:11] It's weird.
Speaker 2:
[120:12] Weird?
Speaker 1:
[120:13] It's weird.
Speaker 2:
[120:13] It's chandeliers and white, gaudy, gold, beautiful furniture. And what?
Speaker 1:
[120:20] It's kind of strange. In terms of like, it didn't feel transcendent. It felt a little uncanny.
Speaker 2:
[120:27] That's because it hasn't been dedicated yet.
Speaker 1:
[120:29] There we go.
Speaker 2:
[120:30] Once they dedicated, the Holy Spirit can dwell in it. Until then, it's just another building.
Speaker 1:
[120:36] Fair enough.
Speaker 2:
[120:36] Fair enough. You did not read the Book of Mormon with sincere intent.
Speaker 1:
[120:39] I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:
[120:40] And you did not go into the Mormon temple with a prayer in your heart.
Speaker 1:
[120:44] I think that was the problem.
Speaker 2:
[120:45] Yeah, plus you have a Nemo. You think you're going to feel the Spirit going to the temple with Nemo?
Speaker 1:
[120:49] Not a chance with this guy.
Speaker 2:
[120:50] The Lord cannot dwell where there's iniquity.
Speaker 3:
[120:53] And British people, famously. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[120:59] You need to come back to Utah and have a proper Mormon experience.
Speaker 1:
[121:02] I would love that. I would love that. Maybe I'll go to General Conference.
Speaker 2:
[121:06] Are you going to General Conference this weekend?
Speaker 1:
[121:07] I think we're going to General Conference.
Speaker 2:
[121:08] Are you all going to do like maybe a review of General Conference or something?
Speaker 1:
[121:12] I'm hoping to.
Speaker 3:
[121:14] General Conference. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[121:15] Okay. Nemo, what do you want to tell my audience that you have them captivated?
Speaker 3:
[121:21] Be nice to each other. Be more like Jared, right?
Speaker 1:
[121:25] Oh, please don't do that.
Speaker 3:
[121:27] Try and build some bridges, try and understand each other. I think it's been a really good conversation for that. Don't be scared of atheism. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[121:35] Support Nemo the Mormon?
Speaker 3:
[121:37] Yeah, sure. You can do that if you like. I'm really happy to be out here in Utah. But I'm out here just chilling. So if I've put some videos up already that will go out while I'm out here, and if you want to support me doing this, then yeah, it's donorbox.org/nemo the Mormon.
Speaker 2:
[121:54] All right.
Speaker 1:
[121:55] Awesome. John, thanks so much for having me. Nemo, you're a homie. You're a real one.
Speaker 2:
[122:01] Sorry we couldn't go five hours.
Speaker 1:
[122:03] All good.
Speaker 2:
[122:03] But I'm glad we could have you in the studio. Keep up the good work.
Speaker 1:
[122:06] Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:
[122:07] Let's collab.
Speaker 1:
[122:08] 100%. I'm down.
Speaker 2:
[122:09] All right. Jared Smith, everybody. Heliocentric, Nemo the Mormon, everybody. Thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Thanks to Julia and Brooklyn for all they do to make what we do possible. Thanks to our donors that donate. Couldn't do it without you. Like and subscribe and do all the things, but mostly be good to each other, be kind to each other. And we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. And Nemo the Mormon and Heliocentric, email us at mormonstories.gmo.com, comment on YouTube. And we'll see you all again soon. Take care, everybody.