Jimmy and Emily talk about a movie about population control and why Mormons should stop having so many kids. They also talk about why Mormons don t talk about multiple mortal prohibitions, and why they don't talk about them much in general.
00:00:00.000This really shocked me because it was the more conservative Mormons, the ones who would be considered more extremist, who thought that we were more similar to Mormonism in our beliefs.
00:00:11.640And it was the less conservative Mormons who thought that our beliefs were more distant from Mormons.
00:00:17.920If you look across the Mormon tradition, when I started talking to more Mormons and more conservative Mormons about the way they think the metaphysics of the universe actually works, there is more diversity within Mormon beliefs.
00:00:29.560than there is within any other religion that I'm aware of.
00:00:34.300But what's extra interesting is there's both that diversity, but also this quiet, like, we don't talk about this diversity.
00:01:25.340Well, I'll tell you, in terms of watching something that I thought I didn't want to watch, I watched all of Saturday Warriors, per your request.
00:01:38.500So, people who aren't familiar with Saturday Warriors, it was recommended to us because we've been talking a lot with a Mormon fan of the show to try to understand the religion better.
00:01:47.860And he suggested that we check out this movie.
00:01:50.860And it is really interesting because he said that, like, it gives a good example of why a lot of Mormons had a lot of kids.
00:01:56.940So, you can see it from their perspective.
00:01:58.520And throughout the entire movie, you're having your heartstrings pulled by this little girl who's stuck in heaven because her parents haven't had a kid yet.
00:02:33.520Yeah, and then another one of their kids, the bad guys in this, you want to talk about getting us on board with you?
00:02:39.660The bad guys in this were called Population Zero, and they were a rock band that had seduced one of the sons into thinking abortion was cool and population reduction was cool.
00:04:46.340But this whole line of conversation started for us with a really interesting moment for me.
00:04:52.180So I was on stage, and I have talked with the transhumanist Mormons before.
00:04:58.580You know, like the weird, like technophilic Mormons, which I think a lot of Mormons would consider kind of different from mainstream Mormons.
00:05:06.180And the fact that our ideology and our belief system really aligns closely with theirs, that did not surprise me at all.
00:05:45.980And we were on stage, and he just came out, because I thought that he would see our religious beliefs, our synthetic religious beliefs, where we say, okay, broadly, in a million years from now,
00:05:55.460of our lives, they're probably going to be closer to gods than humans, and that this, or the way we would think of a god than a human,
00:06:02.360and that they wouldn't relate to time the way we relate to time.
00:06:06.040And so it's sort of like a self-manifesting entity that is influencing us today.
00:06:20.160Like, he's like, you guys are basically just Mormons.
00:06:22.500And that surprised me, because that did not align what I understood a conservative Mormon would think.
00:06:31.620And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait.
00:06:33.140And so then I started talking to some other Mormons who were at the conference about Mormonism, and they're like, yeah, you guys are just Mormons, or your beliefs are very similar to Mormon beliefs.
00:06:42.140And this really shocked me, because it was the more conservative Mormons, the ones who would be considered more extremist, who thought that we were more similar to Mormonism in our beliefs, or as they would say it, you know, the Church of Latter-day Saints.
00:06:57.980And it was the less conservative Mormons who thought that our beliefs were more distant from Mormons.
00:07:09.200And this was fascinating to me, because it has shown that I fundamentally misunderstood Mormonism in our previous videos on Mormonism, and in our previous writings on Mormonism, because I fundamentally, one, misunderstood—well, the biggest thing is I misunderstood how they determine what they think is true.
00:07:27.140And there's a very interesting thing that Mormons do that no other faith in the world I'm aware of, because, like, we have studied a lot of faiths, and none of the other ones do this.
00:07:38.620Which is, which is, if I go to one Mormon, and I say, hey, I've heard a lot of Mormons believe X, or, like, church fathers believe X and have talked about X frequently.
00:07:52.520So, like, two examples here might be, like, eternal progression or, like, multiple mortal prohibitions.
00:07:58.940These are two things we'll both talk about on this podcast.
00:08:00.940It is not infrequent if they do not believe in multiple mortal prohibitions or eternal progression.
00:08:06.480They'll just say, nope, no large group of Mormons have ever believed this.
00:08:10.860None of the common Mormons ever believed this.
00:08:14.000None of the church fathers ever believed this.
00:08:16.100And then if you point to them, like, text, like, no, like, this is in, like, stuff that was put out by major church fathers.
00:08:23.960They'll then say, okay, maybe some Mormons do believe this, but they are influenced by the devil.
00:08:31.760What, really? Influenced by the devil?
00:08:36.480And this is fascinating to me, because, like, Protestants, for example, I'm, I'm, I, you know, if you're talking about, like, pre-millennialists or post-millennialists Protestants, so people who don't know what I'm talking about here, in the conservative Protestant community, one of the biggest debates is, does Jesus, like, like, does the rapture happen before the tribulation, or does the rapture happen after the tribulation?
00:09:00.800Do, like, like, devout Christians actually have to go through this period of tribulation, or will they be raptured beforehand, and then the period of tribulation is meant to help people, you know, anyway, nuanced discussion.
00:09:13.020But none of them are going to say, no, there's not some other group that has this other view, and if there is, they're, they're being manipulated by the devil.
00:09:21.060They're like, no, we have a serious difference in faith, and we study this, and, and these are the arguments for my faith, you know?
00:09:28.620There's people out there who are mistaken, but, you know, they're not, like, demons.
00:09:34.800Well, and, and, and the, the reason why, so this has really confused me about Mormonism, because whenever I tried to study Mormonism in the past, if I was going to get, like, a broad view of Mormonism, I actually would always get the best broad views from people who had left the church.
00:09:53.240Well, often those are the people who are talking about it.
00:09:55.520Well, yeah, so, and I, and I should point out, I'm not saying that Mormons never disagree about this stuff, but if you want to see, like, the actual disagreements that Mormons are having, go to the comment section on Mormon blogs.
00:10:09.640And this then came to, why would the conservatives be more accepting of our beliefs than the non-conservatives?
00:10:15.880Why would they think that our beliefs are closer to Mormon beliefs?
00:10:19.300And this is because the more sophisticated Mormon theology, the more interesting Mormon theology, from my perspective, and, and, frankly, the sort of wackier, wackier in that it's, it, it is less in a line with just generic in theology, actually, typically the older Mormon theology.
00:10:38.060Or the Mormon theology you would know if you dug really deep into Mormon history.
00:10:43.240Well, I mean, what I thought was really interesting about one way that it was explained to us is that, like, from, like, most really unique LDS theological concepts, you need to have an IQ of at least 130, and most, like, most Mormons don't, they don't really care.
00:11:01.060They're not really involved in it, and it's really about the lifestyle and even a lot of leadership.
00:11:04.620Just, like, theology is not, like, the primary thing of action here.
00:11:11.280Yeah, so I'll actually read a quote from one of the early church fathers, which I found very interesting and, and, and quite prophetic of our own belief system.
00:11:21.140Orson Pratt, this is the guy who was born in 1811, wrote this, right?
00:11:25.880And, and so when I first went to them, I was like, yeah, but, you know, we believe that, like, intergenerationally, like, we don't believe that everyone's going to inherit their own planet one day.
00:11:35.520And they're like, oh, no, no, no, that's not actually, so they, they pointed me to this Orson Pratt quote.
00:11:40.480But not everyone's going to inherit their own planet one day.
00:11:42.340Some people will, as humans, like, similar to humans as we are today, will be elevated to a state of godhood.
00:11:49.560And they're like, some Mormons believe that, some Mormons believe other things.
00:11:53.080You should look at what the actual, you know, quotes from these early church fathers.
00:11:56.660So I want to read this quote by Orson Pratt.
00:11:58.880This is on, whenever he uses the word intelligence, he's talking about the soul.
00:12:03.100And so he sort of has this hypothesis that maybe the soul exists as individual soul particles, which, when people die, can break apart and, and reform.
00:12:14.380So, like, we may have some soul particles in us that previously came from, like, plants or something like that.
00:12:19.980So he said, we could suppose that these particles, possessed of the power to move themselves, would not have exerted that power during the endless duration preceding their organization.
00:12:29.400If they were once organized in the vegetable kingdom, and then disorganized by becoming the food of celestial animals, and then again reorganized in the form of spirits of animals, which is a higher sphere of being,
00:12:42.580then is it unreasonable to suppose that the seen particles have, from eternity, been passing through an endless chain of unions and disunions, organizations and disorganizations, until at length they are permitted to enter into the highest and most exalted sphere of organization in the image of God.
00:13:05.820And, and here's a quote from Brigham Young.
00:13:08.720When the elements in an organized form do not fill the end of their creation, they are thrown back again, like Brother Kimball's old pottery ware, to be ground up and made again.
00:13:19.820So, you hear these two, and these purport an idea of, of sort of human souls going through a cycle in which they eventually become godlike souls through this sort of forging and reforging process, which is actually really, really similar to our belief if you made it entirely materialistic.
00:13:47.420The idea that, like, our kids are a part of us, and a chance to improve on us, you know, intergenerationally, and that they have, you know, what we would think of as the soul, which is the collection of ideas and genetics that make us up.
00:14:02.120They have aspects of that, but reforged to improve, and that eventually this thing will become a deity.
00:14:08.720Very, very, very, very, very, very similar beliefs.
00:14:13.720And so, early Mormons, like Mormons who are of the most conservative faction, would align more with these earlier beliefs than the more modern church beliefs.
00:14:24.480And so, the question would be, why did the church change its beliefs?
00:14:27.500And this comes to a really unique thing about Mormonism I didn't fully grasp.
00:14:32.820So, it is that Mormonism, unlike any religious tradition in the entire world, the current prophet, the current head of the religion, has more say than their original book or the founder of the religion.
00:14:52.320That is, the current prophet can override Joseph Smith, can just say Joseph Smith was wrong when he said that.
00:15:20.300It actually gets even wilder than that.
00:15:23.160There are instances I have found where current prophets, like Elder Fielding in Answers to Gospel Questions, Volume 5,
00:15:32.140will claim that Joseph Smith said things that he definitely doesn't seem to have ever said, or at least was never recorded in anything I can find.
00:15:41.120For example, that's where the quote that goes something along the lines of,
00:15:45.620the prophet Joseph Smith says that reincarnation is a doctrine of the devil, and have you not read that the devil would deceive the elect?
00:15:53.740Where, when I tried to look through textual evidence, I cannot find Joseph Smith saying anywhere that he thought reincarnation was a tool of the devil.
00:16:02.320And, in fact, I can find many sources that seem to indicate, and many of his contemporaries seem to indicate, that he did believe in some form of reincarnation.
00:16:11.560Though, Joseph Smith did say that the doctrine of transmigration of souls, or souls passing directly to your children, was false.
00:16:19.980So, imagine if you had something like the pope saying, Jesus said that this is of the devil.
00:16:26.760And you're just like, or a current, you know, imam saying, Muhammad said this is a doctrine of the devil, and yet there is no evidence for that.
00:16:36.500This would be incredibly confusing to an outsider trying to learn about the religion, and what the boundaries of the belief system actually are.
00:18:46.740We believe something very similar, but it's due to how we see time.
00:18:53.660Because we see all time is happening at once, we believe that all of our kids are friends, do know each other, and are waiting to come into existence, but in the future.
00:19:04.100So, to clarify, in the movie Saturday Warriors, it begins with everyone in heaven, and they already know each other, and they know that they're going to be family, and they're like, oh, I can't wait.
00:19:34.280Whereas, like, we don't think there's some antechamber before, it's just that everything that has happened and will happen is happening, and it's sort of all at once.
00:19:45.440And I do deny, like, my little daughter, when I interact with my little daughter in 10 years, and it's kid number 12 that everyone told us not to have, it is that little girl who's being denied life by us choosing not to have a kid.
00:19:58.800But it is a life that we would have robbed.
00:20:03.660Just as much as Mormon think that you have robbed a person of their life.
00:20:06.980One thing that I want to say, which I think is really interesting, is when I look at these Mormon videos, they're very similar to how if we were trying to explain our belief systems to a child or somebody who is living in, like, the early 1800s, we would have explained our belief system.
00:20:24.600Which makes it feel very contiguous with Mormonism.
00:20:29.060In fact, one part of our holiday, Future Day, that we haven't really talked much publicly about, and we've been solidifying, actually, after seeing this movie, how it would play out, is the Day of Martyrs, which comes before Future Day.
00:20:44.380Which is dedicated to readings of the Martyrdom of Man, one of the books that we see, like we would see Joseph Smith as being divinely inspired by the same entity which we believe inspired us, in which every member of the family, both the kids and us, explain to past iterations of their parents, so that would be our parents in our case, why they should have us, and why it is a good thing that we would come to exist.
00:21:12.160And what we plan to do with that existence.
00:21:15.020While also thanking our ancestors, not just, you know, our biological ancestors, but the ancestors of humanity in general, for the hardships that they underwent, to give us our current technological and material bounty, as the Martyrdom of Man states, even in the 1800s, that your average English person back then lived a better life than your Anglo-Saxon king.
00:21:40.840And, you know, from our perspective today, your average American probably lived a better life than the Queen of England when that book was written.
00:21:48.900And this is through the intergenerational martyrdom of our ancestors and ourselves to make things better for the next generation.
00:21:58.820And it is a, this is where they sort of take up the mantle of that responsibility, this cycle of continual improvement, while also hopefully instilling an amount of gratitude for how good they have it, vis-a-vis what the daily life of most humans used to be like hundreds of years ago.
00:22:19.140This is meant to instill in our kids that they exist for a reason, and that being alive is a privilege, and it's a privilege that comes with duties and responsibilities to justify your own existence.
00:22:35.140I should note here, though it's less relevant for this particular conversation, that the Day of Martyrs is also dedicated to reading from Fox's Book of Martyrs, not just the Martyrdom of Man.
00:22:45.140These readings are meant to remind kids and our family more broadly what our duty is in face of tyranny or those who would claim to have mental authority over our belief systems.
00:22:59.220While also reminding them to never become that person themselves, never become the person who is telling somebody else what they have to believe is true and not true.
00:23:09.940Because the highest level of freedom an individual has is the freedom to choose what they believe.
00:23:16.100And that freedom must both be protected, but also imparts on individuals the duty to think carefully about those things and decide with prudence how you think things actually work, without allowing other people to tell you what to believe.
00:23:33.120Now obviously we haven't talked about this publicly yet, because it's one of the belief systems that's probably going to get us most shamed by antinatalists.
00:23:41.080But it is very, very similar to these scenes in Saturday Warriors.
00:23:46.600I love how a lot of our more publicly facing documents are more just like philosophy and stuff like that, but we get into actual like religious insanity if you are actually a regular listener to the podcast.
00:23:58.400So I swear when like antinatalists are prepping for a debate with us or something, this is what they must be imagining.
00:24:04.440As far as I'm concerned, this Saturday night, there's not even going to be a fight.
00:24:51.920Now, this gets really interesting and it's sort of, I think the core failure of Mormonism, modern Mormonism, is that a lot of Mormonism recently and Mormon trends and like why they pretend or move towards not having these beliefs is a drive to be seen as quote unquote normal Christian.
00:25:14.260Or just another branch of Christianity.
00:25:17.520And in that quest, they have abandoned many of the spiky and more unique parts of their history and theology, which were honestly the more sophisticated and compelling parts to me.
00:25:35.800But I also think that that's the case with most religions, that like if you actually dive deep into the dogma and you really, really get into it and get technical, it does get weird.
00:25:48.420Protestants, US, evangelicals, they've gone so much.
00:25:52.200No, I'm referring to like Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, like I'm going into, like I'm not, I'm not talking about religions that are in the middle of going soft.
00:26:01.160When those religions become softer, when they abandon the weirder parts of themselves, they're typically doing it in an effort to conform with the urban monoculture.
00:26:13.380When I'm talking about when you get to the core of a religion and it gets weird, I'm referring to hard religions.
00:26:17.740Right, I guess you're right to an extent, but what's really interesting is that Mormonism hasn't attempted to conform to the urban monoculture as much.
00:26:26.000Like there's a faction that's doing that, but where they have lost most of their traditions is in trying to conform to conservative iterations of other Christian denominations, where they have tried to become more like just another type of evangelical Protestants.
00:26:39.220When they are nothing like, and this, and so the question is, is why are they doing this?
00:26:45.160And this is, when I look at Mormonism as an outsider, and I look at the collapsing fertility rates within Mormonism, I actually think that this is a problem of the genetic vortex.
00:26:53.980So we talked about how religions and genetics can reinforce each other, where people with specific genetic predilections can convert to a religion disproportionately, which can lead to those sociological profiles being higher within that religion.
00:27:05.760I think historically, Mormonism really selected for culturally and genetically.
00:27:12.920So I think there's two things going on here.
00:27:15.080An extreme amount of social anxiety and desire to engage in social status competitions.
00:27:25.600And I think that this is why, if you look at like the way that like alcohol ravaged Native American communities, I think things like TikTok and social media have ravaged Mormon communities.
00:27:37.700TikTok is the alcohol of Mormon people.
00:27:41.500Well, that and that this desire to fit in is what drove them to abandoning, I think, the more interesting and to my perspective, sophisticated aspect of their religion, but also to deny that they're different.
00:27:54.920So this is another really interesting thing.
00:27:56.480If you look across the Mormon tradition, when I started like talking to more Mormons and more conservative Mormons about the way they think like the metaphysics of the universe actually works, there is more diversity within Mormon beliefs than there is within any other religion that I'm aware of.
00:28:12.740But what's extra interesting is there's both that diversity, but also this like quiet, like, we don't talk about this diversity.
00:28:53.340Some Mormons, though, believe that you actually sort of get reincarnated or like the quote I was talking about earlier.
00:29:00.740Like that doesn't mean that your soul holistically gets reincarnated.
00:29:03.640It may be like dissolved, recombined, reincarnated.
00:29:07.100But that's a huge diversity in beliefs about what happens after death.
00:29:11.300There really are some Mormons that believe that, that most people are going to get their own planet and become gods.
00:29:16.900Like if they're good people and they follow Mormon teachings.
00:29:19.760My father, my brother, and I had been there at the hospital.
00:29:24.540As we walked out, my brother and I, who went to the car together, smiled and looked up in the mountains and remembered that mother had always said she loved the mountains so much that he and I laughed and guessed that if in fact the celestial worlds are really flat, a sea of glass, she'll be eager to get away to build her own worlds.
00:29:42.660And the first thing she'll build will be mountains.
00:29:44.500But a lot of Mormons don't believe that at all.
00:29:46.980They believe in like more of a traditional heaven.
00:29:49.580Like that's a wild different in beliefs.
00:29:52.140Like you do not see, like you look at a belief system that has many different beliefs, right?
00:30:05.660And also like that over time, there's been a shift within the LDS church on like what canon gets more emphasis.
00:30:13.460Like one person said that currently they feel like it's 35% Book of Mormon, 10% Old Testament and 25% New Testament.
00:30:21.920And then, you know, maybe like 30% DNC plus Pearl of Great Price, which I hadn't even heard of before.
00:30:30.080But then like they also thought that the Book of Mormon probably peaked in 1990 and New Testament is probably at its peak now.
00:30:38.480Also, these like shifts in emphasis, too, of like which text is getting a lot of emphasis, which to me sounded a lot like Jewish tradition.
00:30:49.080It seems like in Jewish tradition, like different texts will get emphasis at different times as well.
00:30:54.260So I just had no idea there was this level of dynamicness, right?
00:31:05.180Well, because like with the Jewish traditions, like you just, you know, like there are names for the different subsets of like these guys believe this thing and these guys believe this thing and emphasize this text and blah, blah, blah.
00:31:42.600And it's not even the current prophet with the LDS church either.
00:31:46.460And I remember seeing this with my friends in college who were Mormon.
00:31:50.240Like everyone kind of has their favorite, their favorite.
00:31:54.980And like people will wax nostalgic about in like different subgroups and subcultures within the LDS church will have their like it was this guy he had he had it figured out.
00:32:05.340And I thought that that's really interesting, too, that like that there is a disproportionate influence of, you know, the current head honcho, essentially.
00:32:16.240But some groups still give the disproportionate emphasis to their favorite past one, which is super interesting.
00:32:42.080Like what is the boundaries of their metaphysical understanding of reality where if you pass out of it, you would know definitely no longer be a Mormon anymore.
00:33:10.520But I think we're the same way about Judaism.
00:33:15.700Like, you know, whether we consider our kids to be Jewish depends on what other Jews think.
00:33:22.220And so many Jews have been like, well, if you're matrilinearly Jewish, then you're Jewish.
00:33:25.540And so we're like, well, okay, then our kids are Jewish.
00:33:27.520But like, yeah, it's interesting that we, to a certain extent, define whether or not we fall into another religion's category of being part of them.
00:33:34.540It's like, well, you tell us, you know, like we're doing our thing over here, but you tell us.
00:33:38.060But hold on, now this gets interesting to us.
00:33:40.320So then with our perspective, and when we're talking about this conservative Mormon, he goes, oh, your beliefs were divinely inspired.
00:33:47.960They came to you via revelation in the same way that, you know, Jophus Smith's beliefs came to him.
00:33:53.580And if you look at Joseph Smith from our religions traditions, right?
00:33:58.160So there's a video where we talk about like the demons we make for our kids.
00:34:00.400And I'm like, I just took those demons from books that were popular during my lifetime.
00:34:05.800But I still think that they are likely real representations of the way that the demonic force, the basilisk, as we call it, the evil side of the future police that tests us.
00:34:16.740We call it the basilisk after Roko's basilisk.
00:34:19.200We recently came up with this, and I really like this as a term for the adversary, the basilisk.
00:34:22.820And the other word that we came up with recently was agents of providence, instead of using the word future police, which sounds a little too hokey for us.
00:34:31.200So we believe that we were influenced by modern day media, but that modern day media was inspired and to an extent constructed by God, the beings that exist in the future, right?
00:34:44.880So when you look at the traditional complaints about Joseph Smith, hold on, I'm going to pull this up at the beginning here.
00:34:53.940Where, you know, a lot of people will say, well, you know, if you look at the Mormon theology, it appears to borrow a lot from what were like at the time sci-fi books, like a view of the Hebrews, which was a book that said, well, maybe the lost tribe of Israel went to the United States and had some other things that aligned with Mormonism.
00:35:13.380And then A Voyage to the Moon, which was a popular sci-fi of the time, some Mormon stuff actually has a lot of parallels to that.
00:35:19.680And so people will say, well, he was just copying, you know, fiction of his time.
00:35:23.180Whereas from our perspective, we'd say, yes, that's how God works.
00:35:30.760Or they'd say, no, he was just making this up, like reading things out of a hat that in order to, and it's like, yeah, that's what we did with our religion.
00:35:40.740I still think that God created, like motivated us through whatever means they could to create an entirely new, like, or we thought new religious structure that we now find has a lot of parallels with early Mormon, you know, theology, right?
00:35:55.460So we look at Joseph Smith doing that.
00:35:57.580We're like, yeah, that doesn't mean it wasn't divinely inspired at all.
00:35:59.680In fact, to us, when we're determining whether or not a belief system was divinely inspired, we look at its efficacy, its spread, and the quality of life of its members.
00:36:11.460And from that, it is self-evident that Mormonism was one of the many belief systems that was divinely inspired.
00:36:18.620Like, we think that Christianity, given the impact it's had on human history, given the importance it's had on us in developing the way we see the world and everything like that,
00:36:27.120that Christ was literally a divinely manipulated or inspired being, and as evidence of that is the effect that he has had on the world.
00:36:38.780So much so that if Mary says, well, you know, he was created, who's to say the future of release, like, if they're really going to influence, like, one person's life, they're like, we're really investing in this person having a huge impact with the agents of Providence.
00:36:51.360If we're really investing in this one person having a big impact on human history, let's just say they didn't actually fertilize his mother, right?
00:36:58.600Like, that could have happened, in which case that is God fertilizing his mother, right?
00:37:03.140So in that instance, you know, we do believe an agent of the divine.
00:37:07.740Now, I think that's probably less likely than other options that they could have used available to them.
00:37:14.100But for all of these things, they do not have any discord with our belief system.
00:37:20.040So for us, yes, Joseph Smith was self-evidently a divinely inspired individual, and he was inspired by the same things that inspired us.
00:37:29.560And yet his revelation in the early Church Fathers' revelation was an incomplete revelation, just as he would say, you know, just the Protestant texts are an incomplete revelation.
00:37:41.140And so in that sense, yes, but we aren't, like, culturally Mormon, and we don't relate to truth the way Mormons relate to truth.
00:37:49.460Although our family, people often think we're Mormons, people who aren't Mormons, when they visit us.
00:37:54.120I remember one guy, we tried to sell our company to him.
00:38:24.460But I will say that I now feel much more of a kinship with this religious tradition than I did historically.
00:38:33.520And one thing that I believe about Mormonism, you know, after studying it more, after looking at the actual diversity of theological beliefs within Mormonism, is I do not think that this centralized structure that makes up the Mormon church right now is long-term stable.
00:38:50.840It's sort of like, if all Mormons actually just hashed out their theological differences, they would realize that they're not the same religion.
00:38:56.420Well, but I think what you're missing here is that for the vast majority of LDS church members, it's not about the doctrine.
00:39:06.620It's about the lifestyle, and I think there's more agreement on that.
00:39:09.900Well, you know, so this is really interesting.
00:39:11.460They're part of the same cultural group.
00:39:14.940So, within something like, you know, Judaism, when they're having theological differences, they'll debate it with, like, biblical texts and stuff like that.
00:39:20.780What's really interesting is when I look at Mormon theological debates, they do not often go back to texts.
00:39:25.980They will relate to modern science, depending on, like, whatever science was common during their time period.
00:39:31.160They will relate to philosophical constructs, very similar to, like, a metaphysics department at a university.
00:39:37.280They are very unbounded by text in the debates that I've read in, like, the comment sections on blogs that are supposed to be about conservative Mormons.
00:39:46.160And so, in a way, you know, being part of this larger cultural group and saying, okay, we'll agree to just have those of us, we'll all participate in this larger cultural group, which is under the central hierarchy, but those of us that are smart, we're actually allowed to think very broadly around the way we relate to the divine, around the way we relate to the concept of soul.
00:40:07.320Don't you feel like you're kind of describing what we describe as the index, where, like, you have a bunch of culturally aligned, we kind of all want the same things, groups, who share a dating pool, who share a lot of cultural resources that work better at scale, who may have some different metaphysical views on how things work, but ultimately work better together, and are just pooling and sharing these resources.
00:40:34.520I feel like that's very stable, and I feel like it's a pretty smart solution.
00:41:02.760Well, I'd be very interested to see where Mormonism ends up going.
00:41:06.700If they can maintain this centralized structure, that would be very interesting.
00:41:10.780If they do end up dividing into different subgroups, that's where, and I think that this is the core reason we're not Mormons.
00:41:18.460The way we relate to truth is a bit different than the way Mormons relate to truth.
00:41:21.760And that we really care about this level of technical correctness.
00:41:26.840In the same way that, like, even when we went into Mormonism trying to look at their scripture.
00:41:29.680Oh, but, like, we want a hard sci-fi version of religion, right?
00:41:32.560But I also, I don't think, I think many, and we've met them now.
00:41:36.860I think many people in the LDS church who consider themselves to be quite devout are taking the same approach.
00:41:42.460Well, and that's why I think that if we look in 100 years or in 200 years, what becomes, like, if our religious system continues down the road, it's going down and our kids are raised within that system.
00:41:53.560If they met a Mormon in 200 years, because I also think that Mormonism is changing from one of these technophilic factions and they're still around in 100 years.
00:42:00.960I think there would be almost no difference.
00:42:03.940Very, very, very, very similar belief systems.
00:42:07.340But I do not think that we are, whatever Mormonism is today and whatever we are today, I think are two slightly different things.
00:42:14.680However, I think that whatever we are today may actually be more appealing to some people who maybe historically would have been within the Mormon church.
00:42:22.860If the church does go woke or something like that.
00:42:25.320And that's where I think that we may end up merging in the near term.
00:42:29.400If, like, I saw one guy who had, like, donated to Biden is in line for church succession.
00:46:22.100And when you watch this, it's heart-wrenching to watch this happen to people because, to me, this is so much worse than just killing someone.
00:46:28.760Yeah, the lost potential breaks our hearts.