Transcript of the podcast Mormon Expression Episode 226: Is the Mormon God a Narcissistic Psychopath?. Featuring John, Richard, Pam, Toby, and Randy.
John: Welcome back to another edition of Mormon Expression. I'm your host, John Larsen, coming to you live and direct from the basement of abomination—isn't that what we decided to call it?—From the new studio 1A. I'm here with another excellent panel. First of all, last minute addition, joining me in the studio is Richard. Hey Richard.
Richard: [Softly] Thank you!
John: Make love to that mic, man!
Richard: [Normal volume] Alright, here I am. Thank you for inviting me in, John.
John: You're welcome. And then I have some other of my favorite people from across this glorious globe. First of all, the good doctor himself, Randy. Hey, welcome back, Randy.
Randy: Thanks for having me.
John: It's my pleasure. And the duo, the twins, Toby and Pam. Hey guys.
Pam: Hey, how's it going?
John: Now, Randy, Toby, and Pam, you guys are all in the Midwest and kind of apropos to this podcast... today we're recording on May 20th. There was a huge tornado that just cut its way across Oklahoma and I hope you guys are all safe. If we hear the horns go off, we'll know what's going on.
Pam: That'll add some excitement to the whole proceeding.
Randy: Well, I'm actually in Jackson County, so we're protected by the Mormon god.
John: I thought Jackson County was under condemnation. I read that in a book. You better watch yourself!
Randy: Aw, shit!
John: We gotta move all you apostates off the land that's rightfully ours!
Toby: Wasn't it three generations? That surely has passed.
Pam: Four generations.
Toby: Right, but Jesus was supposed to come back within one generation, so...
John: Have you ever read... Joseph Smith said, "Those of the rising generation shall not pass before..."—blah, blah, blah—have you ever seen the apologists do the math? They would take, like, this old polygamist who married a 12 year old who had a baby when she was 70 and therefore.... [Laughter] This was back in the seventies. I don't think the math holds anymore.
Randy: Like all religiously derived math...
Toby: A generation is either 15 years or 110 years depending on how you calculate it. [Laughter]
John: All right, so tonight we're tackling a philosophical question of the greatest gravitas. We're going to ask the question that is on the minds of all true believers out there: is the Mormon god a narcissistic psychopath?
Pam: Yes.
John: Pam, you can't just skip to the end!
Toby: Spoiler alert!
Richard: Hey John, are we going to define those terms?
John: Well, that's a good place to start. Go ahead.
Randy: Isn't the term narcissistic psychopath a little redundant? Aren't psychopaths, by definition, narcissistic?
John: You know, a good lawyer pointed out to me one time that every good lawyer always says everything twice in two different synonyms. To pin the board to the wall. If you read legal documents, you'll see that, that they pretend to repeat the same term. So I'm just trying to be a good lawyer.
Randy: Okay.
John: Alright, so let's talk about that. First of all, I'm more fond of the term narcissist than I am of psychopath, but they both have real meaning. They're not just trick words that we throw around. So what is a narcissist?
Randy: Any amateur psychologists out there?
John: We specifically did not bring anybody on with any psychological training because they would just throw a damp blanket on this party.
Toby: Let me go grab my DSM-IV off the shelf, I'll crack that open for us... [Laughter]
Randy: So we can go to the Greek origins of it: Narcissus, if that's how you pronounce his name, was a character that was so beautiful that when he saw his reflection in the pond, he became transfixed by his own beauty.
John: Right. So somebody who has narcissistic personality disorder has a fixation on themselves to an exorbitant degree. This affects just a small percentage of the population, but they're so convinced of their own status or their own privilege or their own sense of entitlement that they don't really have any empathy for anybody around them, and they tend to think about everything just in terms of themselves. Like all things, you can see things in degrees... if you meet somebody with a narcissistic tendency, everything they talk about, everything they do has to do with themselves and is framed in reference to themselves. So that would be the common usage of the term "narcissist." More misunderstood is the term "psychopath." So who wants to tackle what a psychopath is?
Toby: Well, so, in preparation for this, I did go off and read Jon Ronson's fabulous book, The Psychopath Test. And he goes through the whole of history the development of Bob Hare's test... there's 20 different characteristics—and I think it's been expanded now to 21 characteristics—that describe psychopaths, and then you evaluate a person on a scale of zero, one or two on each of these characteristics and then add up the totals. Normal people are going to score about a seven or eight. But then as you get up into the psychopaths, they score into the twenties and the thirties. There's a lot of linkage back to a lack of empathy and some misfirings in the brain that are associated with it. But it's actually a pretty complex diagnosis, which I'm completely not trained or skilled enough to be able to describe.
John: ...Listen, do I have to say it again? This is the Mormon Expression podcast, where training and skill to describe something are completely irrelevant. [Laughter]
Toby: Let's talk about quantum theory!
John: So, psychopathy, or psychopathic behavior, is really marked by very antisocial behaviors. We're talking about "social" in the sense of cooperatively working with a group. Psychopathic behavior, or a psychopath, really doesn't have any empathy... they don't have any emotional response to other people. So the idea that other people suffer, or might not like their action, that thought doesn't cross their mind. So you see those tendencies—they talk about children who torture animals and do things like that—where there doesn't seem to be any connection to the fact that this other being is suffering... that's a marker of, of psychopathic behavior.
Randy: And I think another thing is that they do feel their own pain. So they're acutely aware of their own pain and when they've been insulted, but they cannot transpose those same... they can't understand the pain that other people are suffering. They're completely unable to do that intellectual leap to see, "What would that feel like if that was me?" And that all goes back within lack of empathy.
John: Exactly. Pam?
Pam: Oh, I was just gonna say, so, is it that they don't feel anyone else's pain or understand it, or that they... It almost seems sometimes to me like they enjoy other people's pain? Or is that a totally different thing? Like sadism or something?
John: Well, I think sadism would fall under the umbrella of that, but yeah, there can be a complete reversal. There seems to be, in the little bit of research I did, this... it's marked by this almost quizzical enjoyment of watching the suffering of others. To watch and see how they're going to react. To put others in positions where they... because, since they don't empathize with that, they don't see them as human, they don't make that connection between the other person's suffering and their own suffering. So that manifests in things like complete lack of remorse. And... go ahead.
Toby: I think you're right. This lack of empathy, this shallowness and the lack of remorse, that's one aspect of it. I don't know that they're actually bad-spirited, that their intentions are necessarily bad? As you look at it, it usually shows up as a parasitic lifestyle, or there's pathological lying and they're very manipulative and cunning. The narcissism piece comes back to this, and they don't appreciate or understand that their actions are really causing pain on the other side.
John: Yes. There was a fascinating study from a couple of years ago, where they did one of these tests remotely on CEOs of companies, and they found that there was a strong psychopathic tendency among people who made it to the top. Which, if you've worked in a big company, one where it's sort of cutthroat, you'll see that all the time, that there's people who don't really have a lot of empathy and will step on other people. So, a lot of success in life, especially on a monetary or purely non-emotionally-interactive basis, can be driven by psychopathic tendencies. Like we said in the beginning, this is a matter of degrees. It's not all black and white.
Randy: The corporate world is the perfect environment for a psychopath. The national average for psychopathy is 1% of the general population. And they estimate that about 4% percent of CEOs are psychopaths. It's one of the things that allows you to climb that corporate ladder: if you don't have any empathy, then you're going to do anything it takes to get to the top. In fact, they had a guy in the book, The Psychopath Test, that became a CEO. He actually really enjoyed firing people. He had no problem destroying anyone's life.
John: Yeah, there's a great interview—it's a This American Life interview—where the guy talks about this theory, and he and he hunts down Chainsaw Al Dunlap. Chainsaw Al was really popular in the eighties, and what he would do is he would go into a company—famously, he did it to Sunbeam—and then he would just fire like, I think at Sunbeam he fired 30,000, 40,000 people, which would immediately—
Randy: That's the guy I'm talking about!
John: Yeah, Albert Dunlap, Chainsaw Al. So the stock price, because costs would immediately—and they only figured this out years later after he'd made bazillions of dollars and was out—but there was enough stuff around, enough toasters they'd already made, that immediately profits would skyrocket. But then he would leave the company within a couple of years, by the time the company tanked because they lost all that talent. But the interesting thing on the This American Life interview... this kid goes and tracks him down and talks to him, and yeah, he talks with glee about it, and he tells these stories about firing people, just shitcanning people from their job, and it gave him pleasure. That thing that most of us would be very empathetic of, that suffering, seemed to, like, get him off.
Randy: I think it's important to know that most psychopaths aren't violent. We tend to hear about the violent psychopaths because they become serial killers. But there's psychopaths in all walks of life.
Toby: And in all levels of deities. [Laughter]
Randy: Wait, wait, I've gotta ask this question. Does this rule apply to General Authorities? Because it basically is a corporate structure. Did Tommy Monson get to the top because he's a psychopath?
John: I think that there is a detachment. Without going into full, you know, saying, "These are narcissistic psychopaths," there's a detachment that allows you to do the hard things that need to be done to rise to the top. And I've noticed this in the Church and I've seen it elsewhere, where there's loyalty tests that happen. In terms of, "Can you do..." I'll give you an example. The first management gig that I got, I'd worked my way up the corporate ladder and I finally was hired as a direct manager of people. So I sit down, and they say, "Welcome, we're glad to have you," and they handed me a list and they said, "Fire these three people." I understand why they did it now, because I could say, "Look, you know this isn't coming from me..." But when you're in a position of management, you will be given these tasks.
John: I think we've mentioned on the podcast before. I think in the mob they call this... I can't remember what they call it. But once a mobster has done something really awful, like he's killed somebody or whatever, then they know he can't turn pigeon, he can't squeal on everybody else. So he's in, he's bought in. And once you've shown that display... You guys can all ask John Dehlin about this. John Dehlin was a software project manager, and for a while he worked on the software that tracks potential General Authorities. He won't talk about it very much, but he did. So they start tracking these guys for years. And they're going to look for signs of loyalty, they're going to look for signs of devotion, and they're going to look for, probably, low level signs of this psychopathic tendency of not empathizing with the underlings.
Pam: Right. And probably not even realizing that they're looking for that, or being honest with themselves, completely, about that.
John: When I think through my inventory of the leadership of the Church, there's nobody who I would label a psychopath. Is there anybody you guys would label a psychopath?
Toby: Not on the test, completely.
John: And to be fair, we all have some tendencies.
Randy: Oh, absolutely.
John: We're all a mix of gray. 50 Shades, even.
Toby: In different pieces of them. The first facet of the psychopath test is all around interpersonal. It's glibness, superficial charm, and grandiose sense of self-worth. Pathological lying... I think there's a portion of that especially demonstrated in the old guard, but I mean, I can't look at Hinckley and think that he had very many of these things popping up in him.
John: There was a realization on that that sort of jogs this memory... so I always struggled. I was a believer, but when I gave blessings or that sort of stuff, I didn't feel anything. I didn't feel any magic words coming to me. And I always felt this sense of inferiority, this sense that I'm not worthy, this shame around that. Well then I left the Church, and I realized that there were two types of people. There were people who were like me, who were struggling with that quietly, but there were others who were very bellicose about their ability. And they can only fall into two categories. One is they were self-delusional, and the other is they were straight-out liars, right? Because I look now and say, "No, there was no God whispering stuff in their ear," from my perspective. And so that leaves only those two things: they were delusional, or they were flat-out lying. It's that second one. It's the same thing with a lie detector test. You cut the middle out, but, but you're not gonna get the pathological liars, because they believe what they're saying.
Randy: That reminds me of mission politics, the guys that would rise to AP... if you knew any of them before they got to AP, a lot of them were just assholes. They would lie about their numbers, and then you had a... it was like a mini corporation.
John: Exactly. That was one of the the takeaways from my mission. I really learned how corporations work. The suckups, and the ass-kissers, and how all that stuff goes, it was this mini view into how the big-time corporate world works. So I'm thankful to the Church for giving me that blessing of an opportunity. [Laughter]
Toby: I got none of that, but there were a lot more boobs in Iceland, so that was a good trade off.
John: You got none of that?
Toby: None of that. There was only eight of us, so there was not a whole lot of corporate structure to that. You guys were Stateside.
John: What's that thing they say, Toby... they say, "There's an asshole in every room," and you should look around, and if you can't see one, then you're the one? [Laughter]
Randy: It's basic statistics!
Toby: Why, I am a psychopath!
Randy: I don't know if it's important enough to mention it, but psychopathy actually is not one of the 370-some-odd mental disorders listed in the DSM, which is like the big book of mental disorders in Psychology.
John: What about the DSM-5? We're about to get a new copy.
Randy: Well, stay tuned... but one of the reasons why it hasn't been included is because it's really subjective and a lot of the top psychologists don't think that their colleagues can reliably measure things like empathy, which is pretty subjective.
Pam: Because they're psychopaths? [Laughter]
Randy: It's the psychopaths keeping it out, isn't it!
John: Okay, so let's talk about God. An observation I made years ago—and I will rightly acknowledge that I have not had an original idea ever, so if anybody wants to point out that I'm repeating something somebody else says, well, obviously—years ago, I put together the Deity Test. This is one of those mind exercises that I went through when leaving the Church, which is, if you apply the standard set of morality that you walk around with all the time to God, God seems to fail the moral test over and over again. Or in other words, if you had a guy down the street named Larry who acted like God does, I think almost every rational person or every sane person would say, "Larry is fucking weird." And they would say, "Larry is scary." And they would say, "Larry is dangerous." And I think that's the fundamental argument in a nutshell here. We can kind of unpack that now.
Randy: Well, that reminds me of Euthyphro's Dilemma where you've got the two horns. One horn is, "Is something moral because God said or did it?" Or, "Did God do it because it's inherently moral?" And if we're talking about a Christian god, it's a whole different argument than the Mormon god because the Mormon god is fundamentally different than the Christian god.
John: Let's unpack that for a minute, because I think there's a lot of people who would accuse the Christian god of having these problems. But, let's talk about the difference, the key difference between, say, a standard Protestant, Christian god and the Mormon god. What are the differences between these two?
Toby: In your Protestant god, are you completely ignoring the Old Testament god? Because if you really do talk to most Christians, they kind of just shut the book at the first part and start at Matthew.
John: That's what I love about the Simpsons! Because it's the Old Testament god in the Simpsons, with the white beard... they don't fool around with this mamby pamby New Age stuff!
Toby: No, I literally had this discussion with many people over the last few weeks! They just simply do not accept the god of the Old Testament! They start with Jesus, and that's it. And I understand why, because the god of the Old Testament is clearly psychopathic. But it's interesting that the book is still connected somehow.
John: Well, I think that lends to the point that they just ignore it... but you have to deal with it. Can you define God and say he's not psychopathic by dismissing some of his behavior? Or, if I only beat my wife occasionally, does that mean I'm not an abusive husband? Because most of the time I don't hit her, right?
Toby: What phase of the moon was it, and what ZIP Code were you in? There are rules about these things. [Laughter]
John: Okay, so let's start with the New Testament god.
Randy: So we're starting with the New Testament god, we're skipping the whole Old Testament? That's too easy.
John: Alright. Let's level set. What's the difference? Let's talk about the delta between the Mormon god and our Methodist god.
Toby: Well, the Christian god is omnipotent, omniscient, and, uh, omni... what's the other one.
Pam: Omnibenevolent?
John: Omnipresent.
Toby: He exists outside of time and space... I thought it was... "All good."
Pam: Benevolent!
Toby: Yeah. He's all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing... and all-present.
John: Yeah. I think you hit the key there. That in traditional Christian theology, God is separate from the universe, that God is not part of the universe. And in Mormon theology, no matter how much the apologists try to throw sand in your eyes these days, God is part of the system.
Toby: And that's complex too, John, because the god that we worship is just a god in an everlasting line of gods, back to some god that had no beginning, potentially, but went through the same... and our kids are going to be gods too.
John: Absolutely, there's that problem of recursion. But even Christians have that problem.
Toby: Ours is particularly bad, though. Because the god that we worship when we pray to, how much real free will and free rein does he have? Or is he just forced to work from the script of the god before him?
Randy: Well, in the Book of Mormon, it clearly states that there is some law, and the reason why God is God is because he's perfectly obedient to the law. If he was disobedient to the law, he would cease to be God. That's an absurd idea to a Christian.
Toby: So he's no longer all-powerful then.
Randy: So he's a small-g god, like, like Brian Dalton's Mr. Deity.
Toby: Aw, that's capital-G God. That's capitalized for sure.
John: I wrote an essay a few years ago, where I said that God is in hell. He has this miserable, miserable existence. Because God, in the Mormon paradigm, is this exalted man—man, let's be clear—who has achieved perfection. And he's achieved perfection through exercising this free will. God has free will. But according to the Book of Mormon, God must make the perfect choice all the time. So when presented with the dessert tray, God must make the perfect choice, right?
Toby: Or he ceases to be God.
John: Or he ceases to be God! So God is omniscient, he knows everything, he knows everything that will happen, and he must, of necessity, always make exactly the right choice because he always knows exactly what the right choice is. So he can never, under any circumstance, exercise his free will. He must always choose to do exactly the right thing. So he's locked in this prison of having free will, but never, at all, being able to exercise it.
Toby: So he may as well be a robot.
John: Right! So if God had another spiritual baby, it's because that was the Universal Right Thing To Do, not because he had a whim to do so.
Pam: Well, maybe that's why our world is so messed up, Because our God actually went to hell. [Laughter]
Toby: He's a baby on a throne in hell.
Randy: Yes... that explains a lot. He's a tantrum-throwing two year old.
John: Well, you know, there's this narrative in the West. It's a very prejudicial narrative that there's this progression from polytheism to monotheism. But if you sit back and think about it for awhile, polytheism much better explains the world we live in. You know, you've got a horny god and you've got a drunk god, you've got an angry god, and they're all at battle. Well, that better explains why humans exist the way they exist.
Pam: Well, sure, because you're taking all of the aspects of humanity there, instead of just trying to pin "perfection" on a god.
John: Right, right. And then you have the absurdity that I sort of hinted at, of what perfection is, anyway. Is there always a perfect choice? I remember my father one time, I was a little kid and I was saying to him, "Well, how could Jesus have grown up and never done anything imperfect? Like, every time he bounced a rubber ball, he did it perfectly?" And my dad, he introduced a conundrum—my dad's really, really bright, don't get me wrong, but—he said, "Well, Jesus had until he was eight to get perfect." But who exactly paid for the sins of the seven year old? I liked the idea that the seven year old Jesus was a dick, and that suddenly at eight, he magically...
Pam: Had to get all that sinning in early!
Randy: So when that fig tree didn't give him any fruit and he cursed it and killed it... that was the perfect thing to do in that moment.
Pam: In The Wrinkle In Time, all those kids are bouncing the balls at the exact same rhythm because they have to be perfect... like, that's kind of what his childhood would be like.
Toby: Sounds like a dystopian novel.
John: Pam, you make a great, great point, because perfection implies there's a singular way to do something. And to strive for perfection would indicate that even if you take out my conundrum of free will there—let's say that within this bubble of “perfection,” there's still choice—but people would tend to narrow down to this idealized way of doing things. They would start to all dress the same and act the same because that is the perfect way to do so.
Toby: So, John, is the critique, then, not so much against the Mormon god—because he's fairly powerless in the system—but more against the rule book that he's following?
John: Well, potentially. But there is an argument—that falls out more in polytheism and some eastern religions—that plays "God" as sort of this being that isn't completely empathetic with human beings. And actually, the best part of the Bible—not to sound like an elitist snob because they all say the same thing—is the book of Job. I remember one time hearing this narrative that bridged the Old Testament with the New Testament: Job is where God awakens to his dickishness. Before the book of Job, God is a great big cock. He's going around, he's drowning babies, having them rape virgins and cattle... and just, think about the most nasty thing you can think about, and God is doing that stuff, right?
Toby: Banging babies' heads against the walls.
John: Yes. And so Job comes along, and the Devil—who's always a good guy in the Bible, or maybe I'm just all screwed up—but the Devil comes along and says, "Hey God, y'know, let's make a bet." And they make the bet, of course, and then they do all this stuff. They punish Job, and they kill all of his kids, and give him boils and all that sort of stuff. But then these three old Jewish guys come along and they all start philosophizing for awhile, and then God gets pissed off and comes down and defends himself. And he's really accusatory towards Job. Y'know, "Where were you? Where were you when I set up this world?" And the narrative that I like is that this is the point when God is awakening to his humanity. And at this point he decides, "Well, I'd better go figure out what the hell's going on." And then he puts himself in flesh and comes down and becomes Jesus and says, "Oh, yeah, that was kind of fucked up. Maybe we should be kind to one another."
Pam: Y'know, I always thought that way. I'd read the Old Testament and thought, "Gosh, he was really a jerk. When he came to earth, he must have really realized how much of a jerk he was." I'd always framed it that way because it seems—
Randy: Really? Consciously, as a Mormon?
Pam: Consciously, as a Mormon, framed it that way. Because it seemed so discordant, the way the Old Testament was.
Toby: The problem with that is, God was on an earth before this. He already lived! He knows our experiences. He did all of this stuff!
Pam: No, I see the problems there. That's just the way that I framed it because it didn't make any sense to me. They seemed so diametrically opposed to one another; the way that those two gods seemed to see the world.
John: I think that's one of the reasons that the Mormon god is more problematic on this, issue, because God should have some empathy. He's been through this before. And why God isn't looking up and saying, "Hold on, this whole system is just fucked up! Why are we doing it this way over and over and over again? If my purpose is to bring about the eternal life and salvation of man, we're going about this the complete wrong way! I mean, we lose a third from the top!"
Randy: The word "incompetence" comes to mind. I mean, that's like the number one attribute of God. He's just totally incompetent. But I've got a question. I mean, Mormons don't generally go second, third layer to their theology, but what is this law? Who made this law? Was there, like, some panel of gods? If God is disobedient, who's the one that strips him of his power and makes him cease to be God? Has anyone ever heard anyone even try to describe what this law is, that has always existed?
Toby: See, Randy, it's turtles all the way down.
Randy: Yes, exactly.
John: You're right, and you brought up the Euthyphro, and it's so rich that we need to spend a whole podcast just on that and comparing it to Mormon theology. But you're right, Mormonism does displace, and it actually deifies the law, or the good, above and beyond God. It explicitly does it. Theologians who read the Book of Mormon, who run into that phrase, that "God would cease to be God" must just flip their heads because it just turns all of Christian theology on its head.
Toby: Now, here is an interesting thing though, right? So we'll look back and say, "Think about Joseph Smith putting that in the Book of Mormon in 1829." This was before he had come up with the whole multiple gods thing. This was really early in the development of Mormon theology. And that was probably one of the most radical early teachings from Joseph Smith, right?
John: Well, he was trying to solve the theodicy in sort of a back-wooded, half-witted way. [Laughter] And I say that because it doesn't solve anything, and it introduces more problems. Because in the same passage, if I remember right, it introduces another conundrum that I want to underline for this podcast, which is that "the natural man is an enemy to god." Okay. So. This is the first strike to me on the psychopathic thing, because what is man, but the offspring of God? If you suggest that man, by their very nature, is a loathsome thing to God, that God hates mankind and God wants mankind to rebel against their own nature... this is a behavior that is not right in the head.
John: So, like, if I get some animals, some pets, and the pets act according to their nature, they do what the pets are genetically biologically programmed to do, and that angers me, or upsets me, or makes me want to take revenge on them... what's a group of bunnies? I want to say coven, but that's not...
Pam: Vampire bunnies.
John: That's what you make your cheerleaders in, right? Cheerleaders come in covens. What are bunnies?
Toby: It's a warren of bunnies.
John: A warren of bunnies. Yes. Thank you.
Randy: Wow, did you Google that?
Toby: Absolutely not. That was on the tip of my tongue. [Laughter]
John: So you have your warren of bunnies. And they do what bunnies do.... and you drown them all. You drown the motherfuckers, right? Because they're acting too bunny-like, and you openly acknowledge that you're angry or displeased at them because they're acting like bunnies. This is not the correct thing to do! This is the kind of thing that lands you on the couch! If you're a normal human being.
Pam: On the couch... [Laughter] Murder'll get you to the couch.
Randy: Well, I think the first sign of God's narcissism is that he created man in his own image, and then really early in the game, he drowns all the motherfuckers. And he throws in the animals just for good measure, drowns all the animals too.
Pam: And the plants!
Randy: And the plants.
John: And the freshwater fish.
Randy: And so every time we're baptized, we're reminded of how pissed God was, and how regretful he was of man. It's sick in the head, and it's part of Mormon theology. Mormon theology loves the Old Testament god. I mean, the temple ceremony is Adam and Eve!
John: Yeah. I think a good way to understand Mormon theology, if you're coming at it from the outside, is to take this Old Testament, Bronze Age religion that evolved into the New Testament religion, and then you take and replant—you have the snake eating its tail—you take and replant the Old Testament back into the New Testament and then you have Mormon theology.
Randy: Yup.
Toby: So Randy brings up an issue... the whole idea of the flood hits on another of the checklists for psychopathy, around impulsiveness. Impulsiveness around deciding to flood the whole planet! I don't know if you could actually devise a more idiotic way to kill everybody on the planet. A virus would be more effective, fires from heaven would be more effective... there's so many different ways that resolve issues with fossils and with glaciers and with coral and with everything else that could have maintained the scientific record. It makes no sense. It really is about the worst decision you could make.
Randy: There's absolute callousness for collateral damage. I mean, he just pulls out his Uzi and just mows all of them down.
John: And if you look at statistics, I think even in the world today, a huge percentage of the population is under 18. And the population that's under 12 at any given time, especially pre-modern medicine, was high. So you're talking about most of the human race, or a huge percentage, being really young and not very responsible for the things that are going on... let alone the poor cows!
Toby: But the eight-year-olds were callous sinners, John, and the seven-year-olds get to go straight to heaven if they get drowned.
John: [Laughing] That's true!
Pam: No, it's like when the tsunami hit. I mean, even in recent history, when the tsunami hit, most of the 250,000 or so people that died were children. It was nearly all children.
John: Yeah, we laugh about this, but in Mountain Meadows, they spared the kids under eight, right? So, the theology, which a lot of people are saying, "Look, you guys are just being dicks, no one takes that stuff seriously..." The problem is they do. They do! They killed everybody who was over eight and they spared the ones under eight because they were somehow to be preserved. So the theology is taken seriously.
Toby: So that's even worse, John, in that the theology handed down by God in Mormonism is absolute. "Your state in the afterlife is going to be determined by the rules of God." But those rules flex all the time. That letter from Joseph Smith to Nancy Rigdon, when he was trying to convince her to become a polygamist wife, he says, "That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be and often is right under another," means that the goal post is indeterminate! You don't know what God is going to ask you to do, and you're just completely at his whim!
John: Yes, there is a great book I would recommend everybody read called The Manipulated Mind. I can look up who the author is. The book is about brainwashing. It's a legitimate study of brainwashing. The thing that that your captors do to you is they're not going to give you a consistent set of rules. Because the rule of law is not important.
John: And this is where Mormons even depart from the Old Testament, because you have an arbitrary and capricious god, but the arbitrary and capricious god still wants you to obey this finite set of rules. He wants you to obey the Levitical law, right? And when you're forgetting him, when you're not worshiping, not obeying the law, that's when the hammer comes down in the Old Testament. For Mormonism, and then of course in standard Christianity, we have a god of love who is more about believing him, worshiping him—which is itself a narcissistic thing, we can return to that—but the New Testament god is more forgiving. But the Book of Mormon introduces this god that no longer has a consistent set of rules. I mean, what's the opening tale, or the main first narrative? It's Nephi going back and chopping a drunk's head off, who's passed out, on this pretense of this nation dwindling... when we know that the whole goddamn place is about to be wiped out in the first Babylonian captivity! You can make the argument that if Laban had lived, the Jews would have been in capture because they already were going to be! That was set in historical stone. Just ask Isaiah, right? So, the first lesson of the Book of Mormon is that God does not obey his own moral law, i.e. you can kill a drunk, and you have to do whatever God tells you to do.
Toby: I think that's somehow associated with the Abrahamic covenant though, John. It's a very complex covenant. [Laughter]
John: So, all throughout the Book of Mormon, you find these scriptures where man is not to trust his own instinct. Man is not to trust his own moral compass. Man is evil by nature. And the rules change all the time. So to go back to The Manipulated Mind and the way you brainwash... if you're a North Korean prison warden, you're going to change the reward system. So the inmate doesn't learn that if he gets up every day at six, he's going to get his gruel. What the inmate learns is that he has to be completely and utterly dependent upon his captors. This brainwashing takes Stockholm Syndrome to the nth degree, because you give up any sense of normalcy or any sense of moral code. It's all, "I'm going to do whatever the person asked."
John: And what Mormon theology, what the Mormon god is asking is, "Ignore science. Ignore reason, ignore common sense, ignore the rules even. I'm going to give you a bunch of rules, but you have to ignore them. What you have to do is do whatever you are asked unquestioningly, and that's what's going to get you into heaven." Because if you use your own compass and say, "No, that's not correct," you are off base and you are not worthy of celestial glory.
Randy: What's the first law in heaven in Mormon theology? It's obedience. And what you're saying, John is, for brainwashing, it's not an appeal to a law that can be objectively analyzed or scrutinized. It's the authoritarian setup. It's the authority, not the written laws, that's the control mechanism.
Toby: Now, what fucks this up even worse though, is rolling this back to the earlier discussion that says "Our god has no free will. He's operating off of a book..." and this book is so unpredictable and so indecipherable that there is no common thread of what's moral and what's not moral. How does that even work!?
John: Exactly! Because because Mormons appeal to this sense of "good" and "right" and "families can be happy," and they throw these words around, but ultimately, as Randy was pointing out, if you go two or three layers deep, you would have to come to this conclusion that the natural man is an enemy to God, and that we as human beings, if you really believe Mormon theology, have no sense of right or wrong at all. Meaning, you're repulsed to things like murder or torture, but your moral compass Is completely screwball. You have no idea what's right and wrong. And that is just a really fucked up idea. To me, thIs is one of the things that helped me get out of the Church, because it really didn't matter if the Church was true. Because what I was by birth, the reason I'd been endowed with by my creator, was wrong. And assuming that God has the capacity to be a creator, that he is omnipotent, then God created me in a way that preordained my failure in the system... and then he punished me for my failure in the system.
Randy: Yeah. This probably applies more to the Christian god because if you're a fundamentalist Christian, you believe in a literal hell, but they compared God to one of those mafia-run neighborhoods... they'll go to, like, a small merchant and they'll say, "Hey, you need protection." And they'll say, "Protection from what?" "Hey, you never know what could happen." And if the guy refuses, then they'll throw a rock through the window the next day. And they'll come back and say, "You still want that protection now?" So the mob guy is selling protection, but it's protection from himself. And that's what God does. He creates hell, creates us, he creates the problem, and then when we fail, it's basically him that created the punishment, so all we're doing is buying protection from him. Does that make sense?
John: It makes perfect sense. Let's go after our evangelical brethren for a little bit. And sisters, but evangelicals don't like women either... so when I say that I'm giving women a pass. So, they believe all God wants is for you to accept him as your personal savior, confess your sins to him, and just say, "I believe in Jesus"... and worship him. Worship! Now when we talk about narcissistic behavior, if you are a being of a higher order... Let's say you're graduated with three PHDs. And you're really super smart. And you've passed every test and you're in MENSA and all this stuff. If that person then went down to, like, a local community college school for people who suffered traumatic brain injury, and demanded, because you were so far in front of them intellectually, that they worship you... that's fucked up! Right? Why would a god want anybody to worship them at all?
Randy: He seems to need it too. Like, it seems like it's a need!
Pam: Well, it's certainly a requirement for us, but you hear a lot of Mormon people say, "Well, no, it's not for him. It's for us, you know, it does us good to be constantly worshiping." Nobody ever explains how that is. But I see that turned around.
John: I'm going to say probably the most offensive thing I've ever said. I'm even hesitating.
Toby: Do it, do it!
John: That's the reasoning that child molesters use. They oftentimes say, "Well, I was doing it for the child."
Toby: Really!?
John: It's a screwed up sort of view... even torturers and people who do really cruel things will oftentimes turn it around and blame the victim and say, "I did this because the victim deserved it," or "I did this because this is what was needed. This made the person much better." You know, "I'm a drill sergeant in the marines in 1962 and I'm making men out of these boys. That's why I'm treating them like this." Yeah.
Pam: Well that goes back to the story about Nephi cutting off Laban's head. God could have easily given Laban a heart attack, but he forced Nephi to kill him. So he was playing mind games with him.
Toby: Well after he took his clothes off. Because he didn't want the clothes to be all bloody...
Randy: Yeah, thanks to the Book of Mormon movie, that's clarified.
John: So let's go back to our evangelical stripe. So we talk about that God wants to be worshiped, but this whole concept of hell, from an all-powerful god... God envisioned and created this place. So no matter how bad you envision hell, you have this problem of then going back and saying, "This is a product of the imagination of the deity that I'm worshiping." And ultimately I think you'd have to say that God is in charge, right? So God—and this is just a plain old version of the theodicy, the problem of evil—but because hell is eternal, I think it really amps up the problem. Because you can say, "Oh, well there's a monkey in the wrench right now. There's this Devil walking around screwing things up. Ultimately, God's going to set things right." But if you talk about an eternal punishment and eternal hell, then you have to deal with the fact that God allows this to continue on and on and on and on forever.
Randy: Which is completely disproportionate to anything anyone is even capable of doing here on earth.
Toby: Anybody who has studied any calculus understands that the idea of infinity, infinite suffering... There is nothing that you can do on this earth that would justify infinite suffering.
John: Indeed. Yeah. Especially when you start thinking about how, you know, there's movements and it's really a paradox of free will. The paradox is this: okay, let's assume human beings have free will. Let's assume my friend Richard sitting here has free will. Now let's eliminate Richard. Let's erase him from existence. Would somebody observing those two worlds, the world with Richard and the world without Richard, notice any difference? And the answer is really no. I would go so far as to say you could eliminate people like Socrates and people like Adolf Hitler and you would still have basically the same outcomes because these movements are bigger than all of us. Like, you can't really credit one person with the invention of the Internet. It would have happened if you had eliminated any one of those people.
John: So you have these great big things, but to go back to our god, this omnipotent god is the one person, the one being in the universe, the one sentient individual who can change these things, who can move the course of it. So for everything that's happened in the world, there's one thing that can be blamed, and that would be God.
Pam: Unless he's operating from the book Toby was talking about, where he has no control either.
Randy: That just pushes it back one step to the book, or the law. It doesn't fix the problem at all.
Pam: Oh sure, sure. It doesn't fix the problem.
Toby: So John, on that point, Penn Jillette has got a fantastic quote, and I can't remember it all from memory, but he basically says, if you were to to wipe out all of human knowledge right now, and just wipe everybody's minds clean and start fresh from it, all of the great discoveries of history, all the great discoveries in science and the scientific method and geometry and calculus and everything else would eventually come forth and be exactly the same as we understand it right now. What's going to be different, though, is all of the foundations of religion. Sure as shooting, we're not going to have a story of a talking snake in a garden. So it's interesting to separate those things that are grounded in reality, and those things that are grounded simply in mythology,
John: Right? And that has to do with influence, and the influence of these things that are pushing humankind one way or the other. I think you're exactly right and Penn Jillette’s right, that mathematics is begging to be discovered, because it explains things. It's advantageous. It's somehow woven into the fibre of the universe, as it were. But this religious code, it is not, and I think this plays out... I'm going to make a connection on the whole idea of free will on this planet because the common solution in Mormonism, to the Mormon god, especially, the solution to the theodicy is that we existed beforehand, and to progress to the next estate, we had to come to this world and take a final exam where our minds were erased, and it's very important that God does not interfere—he doesn't violate the Prime Directive—because God can't do that because that would interfere with our free will.
John: But, the system is screwed up because there's all these demons around here, or other human beings that are themselves fucking with everybody else's free will! So if that argument really played out, then what God would be doing is battling against everybody else who is messing with people's free will. He wouldn't have sent the Devil to the planet to do his dirty work because he would have said, "No, I need to preserve free will!" So he's either really stupid, or he wants the system that way because he has set up a system... He's put a petri dish out because he wants to have a clean environment. But a petri dish grows bacteria! If you want a clean room, you don't put out a petri dish! You scrub the walls, right!? And so our scientist, God, doesn't know what he's doing, or, he has intentionally, to the theme of the podcast, set this up to watch us all suffer.
Pam: It would be like if my physiology teacher, if I went in and he had someone else there teaching me English all semester, and then gave me a physiology test and all I knew was English. It doesn't make any sense
John: It would be that way. Pam, except he's teaching you French and telling you it's English. It's like another level of warped-ness! And God is preserving the system! He's holding back the four destroying angels to let the whole system get ripe. And thIs goes back to this date, May 20th now, but there's very few Christians anymore—they're out there, the fundies will tell you that the tornado that did such damage today was God's wrath—most Christians will not. But what the Mormon narrative, what the Mormon theology will say, and I know there's plenty of Mormons who will deny this, but they say that these are "signs of the times," that the the earthquakes and the storms and all things are getting worse—presumably under God's control—because we're getting closer and closer.
John: So the Mormons won't say that god was trying to wipe out that neighborhood in Oklahoma, but what they will say—not directly—is that these are signs of the times and things are getting worse because we're coming to the end. It's still that dick god doing these things in that theology, and that is a psychopathic behavior. That you're upset that people are spanking their monkey and they're getting three piercings in their ear, and so the world is ripe for destruction. So you're going to either allow or cause these things to happen.
Randy: And again, just a total callous disregard for collateral damage. Whenever he wants to make a point, he doesn't care. He just totally disregards who the victims are, as long as he gets his point across.
Toby: Well, the other theory is maybe there were a bunch of people in Utah praying for chicken wings, and maybe there were a bunch of babies in Africa that needed malaria, and he was just too busy to hold that tornado back! [Laughter]
John: Oh, the "distracted god" theory?
Randy: I just have just a quick comment before you move on, John. If—it's Mosiah 3:19, I think—the natural man is an enemy to God, if he created a bunch of people who, in their very nature, are enemies to God... isn't the Devil superfluous? I mean, would we even need a Devil?
John: Yeah. The Devil really is not very useful in Mormon theology to be quite honest.
Randy: Every story needs a good villain though.
Pam: The Devil comes into play more in Christian theology. I have friends who say, their grandmas believed that "the Devil caused a car accident to happen" and he's actually going out causing mischief.
John: Well, I was thinking of, Randy, when you were talking, that what is the Devil? What does the Devil do, or the demons do in Mormon theology? And in Mormon theology, they're hedonists. They're just trying to possess people so they can go out and fuck and get drunk. That's what the stories are always about.
Toby: They wanted a body so bad that they begged Christ to possess a herd of swine, and they ran into the sea. So if they can get a human and fuck the hot chick... damn! [Laughter]
Pam: Whereas in Christian theology, he's more like the guy on the Allstate commercials. The mayhem guy. [Laughter]
Toby: That's awesome, that's a good one.
John: Okay, so let's talk—and I was told once that this was a real case in Utah. I don't know if it was or not, but it's a mind exercise.—So suppose this guy is standing on a street corner and a three-year-old wanders out into the intersection. The man looks at the three-year-old, he's standing on the street corner and he sees a bus coming and he sees that the bus cannot stop in time to not run over the three-year-old, but he has plenty of time to go grab the three-year-old and to take the three-year-old off the street and save them. The man stands there and watches the bus come and watches the bus smash the three-year-old. Now, most moral people would say that to have the power to stop this tragedy, this tragic event, and not exercise it, is in itself an immoral act. Because you could argue that the man did nothing. The man made no action. He didn't cause the bus to come down the street. He didn't push the three-year-old out into the street. He was just a bystander. That the man has no moral culpability. But I think most rational moral human beings would say "no."
John: And then this is where—maybe somebody correct me if I'm wrong—that there was an actual case similar to this where a bystander didn't do anything and there are laws on the books that say bystanders have a duty to interfere in something like this happening. But if you're saying that the Mormon theological escape, of God causing these things... I've heard this argument when we talk about, okay, the sign of the time is that there are more tornadoes coming. They would say, "Well, it's not that there's more tornadoes coming. It's that God has been protecting us for a long time because we were righteous and when we're not righteous, then he stops holding back the storms. So the storms are starting to get worse, not because God is causing them, but God is simply not holding them back."
Randy: Wait, so storms are sentient? And they're malicious?
Pam: And they're after elementary school kids?
John: Yeah, well, but my argument would be, for an omnIpotent being, either letting something happen because you choose not to do it, or causing it yourself, is an irrelevant differentiation for us.
Toby: You really hit a key point here, John. I mean, this is the whole idea that if you believe in a god that can interact with people and make changes in the world... how can you possibly pray about where your keys are or how you need to do on a test, if you can actually pray to, like, reduce starvation or reduce real suffering in the world?
John: Right? And a way to look at that, in common Mormon belief, is that Mormons believe that they were born into good righteous Mormon homes because they were the elect from beforehand. That they were the chosen and the best in their previous estate. So what they're saying is that God can create an environment for the people who he wants to, where they will not have to choose whether or not to join the Church. They will be trained that way from when they were very young, and Mormons will believe that this is a righteous and good thing and an okay exercise of God's free will.
John: But if God can do that for these righteous white babies that were born into pure and delightsome Mormon homes, God could very well do that for the entire planet. God could create a planet of Mormon homes. We would never argue that people born into Mormon homes do not have free will. We would never say that they didn't get to exercise their second estate. We would say that no, they were just valiant beforehand. But if that sort of valiancy can be had, then bingo, God would do it for everybody. But God chooses not to.
Randy: I think the "out," at least the thing that mollifies their cognitive dissonance or their natural compassion for all the starving children in Africa and how God doesn't intervene... what they'll do is they'll cheapen this life. They'll say, "Well, this is just a small speck of a moment in the whole eternities. And so the suffering that child has, that'll be taken care of and and justified later on." That's one of the things I hate about religion, is it cheapens this life and the suffering that happens in this life. The suffering that happens in this life, it fucking matters!
Pam: Right. And if it doesn't matter, there's no point.
John: But it's funny, because it takes it to both poles. Because it says, "All right, this existence is so small, such a blink in the eye of eternity, that for people who suffered tremendously or children who die horrifically when they're six or seven, that doesn't matter because God will make it right." But at the same point, people who do things like, get their girlfriend pregnant and get run over by a bus, are going to suffer eternally even though it's the same blink of an eye!
Toby: The flip side of this, the positive side of the Mormon belief, though, is that there is presumably a path for everybody to get to heaven, right? The aborigines who died in 500 AD, who never heard about Jesus, have gotten an opportunity to get into heaven. And the rest of Christianity is way worse off than that. All of them burn and suffer forever and forever because they never had an opportunity to hear about Jesus and accept him.
John: But isn't this the Achilles heel? If we're going to take one thing that dismantles Mormon theology, it's their solution to that problem. Because if that's the case, that you can be an aborigine born in the year 233 BC, and you were a valiant person—so if you had lived when the gospel was available, you would have accepted it and you would have become the high priest group leader—so therefore you get into the Celestial Kingdom, right? That just takes the whole system and turns it on its head. Because what God could have easily and justly done is put everybody in a room, "Here's your body," and they would've said, "You would make it. You're not gonna make it. You're not gonna make it. You're going to make it." Because that's what that doctrine does. It says that there's an intrinsic part of you—in a Calvinist point of view—that would make you susceptible to receiving the gospel or not, and it's irrelevant what you actually do in this world. So this whole world, everything we do in it, because of the doctrine of the proxy baptism and proxy sealing and all that, just nullifies the whole system. It is all completely pointless.
Toby: You have to roll it all the way back. So any time you have sexual reproduction, there is a set of genes from the mother and a set of genes from the father that intermix and you end up with some random set of genetics. If you roll that back and you say that our spirits, from the, whatever, the, father and his concubines, if that combination tends to have some randomness in the universe in it. So our spirits really are, there is some concept of randomness in our spirits, and our outcome is based upon that random event. And, really, there is no purpose to this life because you can look at those sets of genes and you can say "This is what the outcome is going to be, this is what kingdom you're going to end up with." Maybe the existence on this life is just to have it all play out so that we feel better about being judged and dumped into the Telestial kingdom. But it doesn't necessarily mean that everything is preordained before it happens. Because I suspect in Mormon theology there is some sort of conception around the birth of spirits.
John: Yeah. Actually, that reminds me: the best explanation for Mormon theology that I've heard—it's still screwball—but the gods themselves are just these intergalactic human breeders. So if you're, like, a chicken breeder, what you do is you hatch lots of chickens and you look for a particular trait and then when you find those chickens, then you cull those chickens and then the rest can do whatever they want. That there is this process, this celestial breeding process of creating spirits. Most spirits are defective. Most of us are just not cut out to be one of the gods. So all the gods are really doing is they're just looking for the choicest Grade A prime spirits and those spirits have whatever it takes, through this randomness to become the gods. And all the rest is just a game. So to me, that's the single best explanation, if you want to make Mormon theology work, that the gods are just looking for the other people who happen to have the skill set. Just like the Olympic search committee is looking for the best pole vaulters. It's not like they hate everybody else, they're just looking for the best pole vaulters.
Pam: Right. well, and I think that they talk about that in the Book of Abraham. They talk about "many of the noble and great ones," that's pretty deeply woven into Mormon theology, that there were people already that were fantastic. You know, Joseph Smith was amazing when he was up there, and Abraham and Moses and all those people.
Randy: Yeah. And it contributes a little narcissism in Mormons because they already think that they were great and noble in the preexistence.
Pam: Oh sure, right! Your patriarchal blessing says that, right? My patriarchal blessing says I was amazing.
Randy: Yeah.
Toby: Well, we have been held back for thIs last gener... oh no, wait. We don't teach that anymore. [Laughter]
John: You're getting too old! They're teaching that to the people who are 30 years younger than you. Yeah... I think that's the shame of this whole system, these narcissistic and pathological tendencies that we ascribe to the deity, you can see them play out... and this was the question we asked at the beginning: our General Authorities, do they exhibit these tendencies? But if you internalize... like, when you see fundamentalists flip out, be they Islamic fundamentalists or Christian fundamentalists, the problem the fundamentalists have is they take it serious. Like, the rest of us don't really take it all serious and they do. And, and when you take it serious, the religion—like you really behave as if it's really true—that's when these narcissistic tendencies start coming in. That "I am the selected chosen one, and everybody else is damned, and everybody else are the Canaanites, and God is just waiting to wipe them out anyway. I am just speeding God's work along."
Randy: And on the extreme end of that spectrum are people like the Laffertys, who believed they were so select that they were speaking directly to God. And then it goes back to Euthyphro's dilemma: is something moral because God said to do it? Well. now you've got people that think they're talking to God, and they are the ultimate narcissists, and they are slitting women's throats in the name of God, because God said to do it so it's moral.
Pam: Right, and in addition to that, those are the people who tend to be the creators of religion. Because they're so narcissistic that they want everyone to live the way that they say is the right way. And so they create God, whoever God is, in their image of narcissism. And I think in Mormonism, particularly, when you have someone like Joseph Smith who is so narcissistic, that God tends to be more narcissistic than other religions because he's created in Joseph's image.
John: Well, we can't get any better than that. Pam, you won.
Pam: Well, thank you!
John: You won the podcast. Alright, well...
Randy: We're not going to talk about Abraham?
John: We mentioned him a couple times. We didn't talk about the tower of Babel, we didn't talk about...
Randy: There's a great Louis CK standup bit on Abraham. I recommend anyone to look that up.
John: There's an even worse one, and it's really actually misogynistic, and I wish I could remember the name, the guy's name, Ahab or something. He wins victory in battle—I know people yelling at the podcast right now because they know the answer—wins his victory in battle and says, "God, thank you for this victory, so the first thing that I see, I'll sacrifice." And he comes back and finds his daughter on the porch and he kills her. This is in the Bible! And it's all okay! It's like nobody... it's not like Abraham, where this is a man, right? This is a potential man who potentially has the priesthood. Oh, The horror—because God stays the hand—the horror if he would have killed them. But if it's a woman, no, just go ahead and knock her off. Women are chattel in the scriptures. So that's that same sort of narcissistic thing. And people just read that shit, and they don't... Like why don't more people read the Bible and say, "Oh my god! I just read that book. Do you guys know what's in there!?" Because it's just full of this really, really warped stuff and it's really kind of scary!
Randy: Yeah. I mean, why does he tell Abraham to kill his son? To see if Abraham loved him. I mean, does it get any more pathologically narcissistic or psychopathic than that?
John: Well, I mean, the garden of Eden! "Heyyyy, look at that tree over there! Doooon't eat... don't eat it! Oh look, ooh, how'd that snake get in there? Oh, doooon't listen to the snaaake!"
Randy: Just fucking around with the ant farm!
John: "Heyyy! You're naked! Dooon't touch each other!" It's just, it's a kid with a magnifying glass and an ant farm.
Toby: There's a great Youtube video on that. By the way. I would recommend it.
Randy: There is. Is it the one with, like, the dark music and...
Toby: Yesss! And he creates the furnace, and he starts burning the ants because he wants the ants to do the right thing...
Randy: Well not only that, he was pissed that they didn't appreciate him! And that's exactly the god of the Old Testament, the god of Mormonism. He just gets so pissed when his creations don't appreciate him and love him! "Don't they realize that they wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for me!?"
John: I think that's a great point. Sorry Pam, you didn't win the podcast. I started writing a short story years ago, which was, this guy dies, and goes up to heaven, and he finds out what the "one true religion" was, like, on the island of Papua New Guinea from the years 1200 to 1400 and there's going to be a prophet that'll come back in another 300 years. And it's like, "Really!?" If you think about the flood, most people on the planet were just like plowing their fields in the middle of, like, Mongolia and then suddenly, "Oh my gosh, it's raining!" They didn't have anything to do with any of that stuff. You know the tower of Babel... So you're in, like, Indonesia, and you're just sitting there chatting with your friends one day, and suddenly you don't speak the same language!
John: From most people's perspective, all this stuff that God did, for most of humanity, they were completely blind to it. Like if you look at all of the humans that ever existed, most of them never even heard of Jesus. And so the system, this Christian system, this Mormon system, it works when you're reading the book and you're talking about this elite little group of people, but you have to remember: the world, if this is true, it's full of all these people who have no clue what's going on and are being punished, and storms, and tempests, and cursings, and they're just completely and utterly clueless. That's narcissist.
Pam: Well, they weren't generals in the army in the pre-existence, so they kinda deserve it.
John: They were fence sitters. Yeah. Fence sitters with tans. [Laughter]
John: Well, I feel...
Randy: Are you exhausted? Your moral outrage all spent? [Laughter]
John: I do feel a little spent. But a key, a key—
Randy: You're welcome.
John:—a key to... you guys are nasty! Um, a key thing for me, when I was struggling, when I was losing my faith and things didn't make sense, was the realization that I had to take moral agency for myself. That the system was so capricious and such a maze of moral ambiguity that the only thing I could do is try to be a moral being and try to live true to myself. Now I understand there's a paradox there too, but the point I'm getting to is, I had to come to a point where I could say to myself, "If there is a god, and I stand before him at the judgment bar, I'll be happy to own all of my own mistakes. And I'll be happy to say 'This is how I came to that conclusion.'"
John: Now, the reason that I got so nasty in this podcast is because these ideas that we talked about are like an infectious virus in a certain percentage of the population. It makes them do really, really nasty things. For most believers, it's just sort of this big game. It's their fairytales. But these ideas are genuinely dangerous. In an over the top hyperbolic scenario here, I want to illustrate why they're bad because because they are dangerous and that's my point.
Randy: Well, they're dangerous in different degrees, but the one that's most applicable to our paradigm here in America in 2013 is the issue of gay rights. I defy anyone to give me a sound argument of why homosexuality is immoral and gay marriage is immoral. And what is it they always go back on? Ultimately all they've got in their bag is "God says it's bad. God doesn't want it to happen."
John: And to build on your point: I heard on the radio this morning that a study came out, they showed that homosexuals who live in states that have the oppressive sort of anti-gay rhetoric and anti-gay laws suffer more from depression and depressive-related behaviors—suicide, alcoholism, all these things. So the ideas are not just innocent. They have real destruction. And I immediately thought of my ex-Mormon friends. There's Mormons who say, "Yeah, look at these people! They leave the Church, and they have struggles with alcohol, they get divorced, they have problems..." Well some of that is because of these teachings that make people loathe themselves, that kick people out of supportive social structures and put them on their own. And then they are more likely to suffer depression and they are more likely to commit suicide or whatever.
John: So it's not like these things where you say, "Well, those were the teachings of men and we were just following the times when we said that Blacks couldn't receive the priesthood..." No. Those teachings and those beliefs had real and permanent damage to other people that someone has to own. And we're saying, if this system is true the way Mormonism—the Book of Mormon in particular—lays it out, God is a pathological narcissist and this guy, if he exists, needs to be rebelled against. But he doesn't. So we just need to help each other become better people.
Pam: And rebel against the idea of him.
John: Exactly. At least the perverted, sick idea of him, because that's what it is. All right. Well, as always, the discussion continues over our website at mormonexpression.com. You can leave your comment there. Um, you can contact me john@mormonexpression.com if you're so inclined. And don't miss our fabulous—speaking of godless—don't miss our fabulous trip to Las Vegas. Tickets are now available for our bus. That'll be leaving Salt Lake on September 26th and returning Sunday the 29th. You can also find us over on Facebook. Search the Mormon Expression VIP Lounge and you'll enter the wild west of free ideas in the Mormon world.
Randy: Hasa diga eebowai.
John: Randy, Toby, Pam, Richard. Thank you all.
Pam: Good night!
Randy: Good night.
Toby: Good night!
John: [sighs]