Transcript of the podcast Mormon Expression Episode 220: Searching for the Smoking Gun and the Parallax Problem. Featuring John, Zipha, Brian, and Dustin.
John: All right, welcome back to another edition of Mormon Expression. I'm your host, John Larsen, and here we're recording our first recording for 2013. This puts us in our 4th calendar year of production, congratulations to ourselves.
[Silence]
Zilpha: That was a lot of applause. [Laughter, scattered applause]
Brian: I was thrown because in the studio you don't hear the opening music! I was waiting for the drums to kick in.
John: Shhh! Don't give away the secrets! I've always told people there's a live band here!
John: To my left is the lovely and talented Zilpha; hi, Zilpha.
Zilpha: Hello, John, hello, everybody.
John: Welcome back. And we brought back another set of my favorite panelists; first of all, Brian Jolly, welcome back to Studio 1A.
Brian: Thanks for the invite! Glad to be here.
John: Glad to have you! I am glad to have you. And, Dustin! Welcome back Dustin.
Dustin: Hello, how's it going?
John: I'm doing good.
Zilpha: And we have a studio audience! Of quite a few. Welcome to them.
John: And yeah, maybe this is a good time to do plugs; of course, this podcast is a product of White Fields Educational Foundation which is a 501C-3, which means every penny you give to White Fields is 100% tax-deductible, just like churches deduct their taxes, so there's a balance in the Force and you can do some good.
John: This year, in order to keep things running and to keep myself sane, I have hired an executive administrator. She works part-time, she doesn't make tons of money, but she does a lot of work. And I've committed that I will now record a podcast every other week for as long as we can pay her salary. So, all of you out there, if you find it in you to throw a couple of dollars our way, through a subscription or through a donation, then we'll keep the lights on.
Zilpha: You're committing to every other week, but you might not be able to. I'd say, "I'm committed to trying to do it every other week."
John: I can make it. That's 26 a year. But only if we can pay Lindsey. So that's the level of my commitment.
Zilpha: Hey Lindsey!
John: So there you go. We use Lindsey, in the most positive sense of that word, to drive activities and other events and support the...
Zilpha: Help keep things organized.
John: Yeah. Help keep things running.
John: All right, I also committed to record four particular podcasts, and I pushed those out, and there's one that I wanted to talk about instead, and that's what I'm going to talk about tonight.
John: People contact me quite often and they'll ask me questions. And the one that I'm most frequently asked is something like this: "You know, I've, I've researched all this stuff and um, I decided the Church is not true. What can I tell my wife/mother/father/son/uncle/boss that will show them the Church is not true? What's the smoking gun? What piece of evidence is most damning, to show that the Church is not what it purports to be?"
John: And the answer is very simple and very direct. There isn't one. There is no smoking gun. And tonight we're going to talk about why there's no smoking gun, because that seems so ridiculous to people outside of religion. And this goes not just for Mormonism. This goes for for many, many things and that's what we're going to discuss tonight.
John: I used the term in the title, "parallax." And Brian, you said you guys were actually discussing the real meaning of the word parallax on the way down. Do you want to throw out that definition?
Brian: Yeah, sure! So parallax is a visual effect that you can understand pretty simply by imagining a driver and a passenger in a car looking at the speedometer. Now, the driver has a head on view, so when you're at 55 mph, the pin lines up with the five and the five. From the passenger's perspective, looking across the dash, even though it's lined up with the five and the five for the driver, it looks like it's maybe lined up with the 50 or so, for the passenger. So they're looking at the same pin, but seeing different conclusions, and it's simply a matter of perspective and how things happen to line up.
John: I chose to use this word on purpose and it's going to maybe annoy some people, but we'll get there. Which view is correct?
Brian: Well actually, as we were driving over here, that set off a discussion—
Dustin: —viewed through our own mind's eye—
Brian: —we all assume we have the privileged view, we think we're seeing things clearly. We tend to see that.
Dustin: Which is where arguments come from. It's like, well, if you only saw it my way, you would understand it!
John: Yeah. And, and you know, the point of a parallax is looking at looking at an object—to extract it metaphorically a little bit—looking at an object from a different point of view, from a different paradigm, will actually give you a different view of whatever object is you're looking at or what everything you're talking about. That your point of view shapes the way that thing seems to you.
John: Now, I obviously think that saying "The Church is true" has no meaning, but I obviously also don't think that it's a worthwhile system of belief. So why would I use this term that would suggest that both views are valid? because what you're talking about—both views from the speedometer—even though their minds are perceiving, you know, one's perceiving a circle, the other's seeing an oval for example, both are completely true, in the universe, right? It is both an oval and a circle. It's not inherently one or the other. The view that one takes of it is the correct view. And you know, there's all sorts of things like this, doppler shifts of light and sound...
Brian: Or those chalk drawings that have that perspective that they're really stretched out if you look at them from the side, or from behind, but if you stand just so, it looks like the water's pouring into a hole in the street or whatever, right?
John: Right.
Dustin: Or how the moon on the horizon is larger than life.
John: I love that example of the chalk thing because if you stand in one place, this illusion snaps into place. And some of those ones—you can search for them on the Internet—are just brilliant pieces of art. But if you shift six inches to the left, the illusion falls and then you can see the nature of the trick. And "trick" is a great word because the same thing works for illusionists or magicians. The tricks they're doing are very dependent on the audience being where the audience is.
Brian: They're called illusions, Michael... tricks are what a whore does for money. [Laughter] For the Arrested Development fans out there.
John: That's why horror movies work too, because when you watch a movie, you're looking through a little box, right? If you want to simulate what a movie would be like in real life, you have to, like, cover your ears and shut one eye and look through a tiny little box. You have no peripheral vision. And then things are scary. But normally when you walk into a house, no one can sneak up on you. That's really hard to do.
Zilpha: The scary music helps too.
John: Yeah. Yeah. Well, when the scary music cues in real life, I get a little nervous. [Laughter]
John: So, the parallax implies that the view is valid, and just like our chalk drawing, that view, that "reality" that there's a cliff in the middle of the road is a valid view. But it's an illusion. And it is highly dependent upon certain things.
John: I actually stole the term from a book that I read back when I was an undergraduate—I went upstairs and found it—by Paul Friedrich called The Language Parallax. It is built somewhat on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is a linguistic theory that suggests that the way we actually view the world, the way we perceive things, is shaped by language. The people who buy into this sort of thing would say that the words we use, determine reality.
John: I think it's true to some extent on higher order things. For example, it's harder for Westerners to grasp Buddhist concepts than it is for Easterners, because they grew up with a bunch of terminology that's based in that. Just like you and I who grew up in the West grew up learning and absorbing Shakespeare and the Bible. And it's just pervasive, and it's everywhere, and it sort of primes the pump for you understanding a particular worldview.
Brian: So there's another element to this. We don't even have to leave our own language to get to it. There are studies that are done where they all have viewers watch a video of a car colliding into another car and they're asked to estimate the speed of the vehicle. But you get drastically different reports depending on the verb you use to describe the car. Crashing into the vehicle, smashing into the vehicle, careening into the vehicle... produces different perceptions of how fast the car was going in the first place.
John: Great point. Because, and you can find things that don't even have meat. A lot of words—to keep on this word theme—trace back to some Latin or Germanic route, but there is no root for the sound "FL" in English. But there's "flap" and "fly" and "fling" and—
Zilpha: "fluff"
John: —"fluff" and—whoa, bust my point?—that all sort of connote the same sort of thing. And linguists can't necessarily account for that, because they can't find this root word. But obviously there's this onomatopoeic process going on, that influences the way we think and we feel and we associate those things. So there's this lattice, is what I'm trying to establish, that's around us all the time.
John: Now let's talk more about religion and our smoking gun. What most people notice after they leave a religion, or if they approach religion from the outside, is that it's complete and utter nonsense. It's an internal system that is full of all sorts of things that are utterly unbelievable.
John: Now, different religions take these things at different levels of seriousness. From a Western perspective, when a Westerner looks at Hinduism and sees these fantastic paintings of Ganesh or whatever—now we're also approaching this from a Western very literal view that the Easterners don't necessarily share—it's got this high level of absurdity. It doesn't make any sense.
Zilpha: ...to someone who's not part of the paradigm.
John: To someone who's not part of the paradigm. Because it's illogical, right? You're approaching those things from a logical perspective, and there's all sorts of base assumptions that just don't fly. Like, when you read Greek mythology, if you don't read it as an entertainment perspective, if you try to get into the mind of a Greek believer, it's really difficult. Because you just keep stumbling on, "But what about this? But what about this, what about this and how does this work? And that doesn't make any sense. This doesn't make any sense. This doesn't make any sense." Because all of those underlying assumptions are missing for you as you're going about that, right? They're not there.
Zilpha: It's preconceived notions or prior belief that makes it so that when you encounter things that go along with your prior belief, they seem to make sense because they do to you. But if you don't have that belief already, then it seems absurd.
John: I think it's even more fundamental than what you're saying. I'll give you a real concrete example of what I'm talking about. We all took math in High School or whatever, and there was a time when you couldn't solve the problem and then the teacher gave you the answer to the problem. Or maybe you peeked in the back of the book; it was an odd question, or you stole a copy of the teacher's edition.
John: And then what you did at that point is you did not, most likely—if you're like 99.999% of the population—question what was written in the back of the book. You began to work the problem backwards. And you kept working the problem until you arrived at the answer that was in the back of the book.
Brian: Yeah. If you didn't understand the problem in the first place, that's a way to at least make sure you're going in the right direction.
John: Right? And many of us ran off the road, especially in higher math, like Calculus, where it was harder to understand, when you arrived at the right conclusion in the wrong way. Because the next time you had a parallel problem, a problem just like it—
Brian: If you skipped on limits, you're not gonna get derivatives. If you don't get derivatives, you're not going to get intervals.
John: And even more if you come up with some crazy rule that can get you this answer in this one case, so when you go onto problem seven, you get problem seven wrong because you were working backwards from the answer. Which is the problem of doing that. Even though scientists actually do it all the time.
Zilpha: But so you're saying that people have their belief and then they try to fit everything else into that answer.
John: Yeah. They work backwards from there. That's right. And we actually do that all the time. Even people who are very aware of that sort of mind process do it just an inordinate amount of time. Probably 9 out of every 10 times we're doing something scientific, we're actually working backwards from our preconceived notion of what the answer is.
Brian: Assume the conclusion is true and make the data fit.
Dustin: Well, that's how we move through the world quickly. We can't figure everything out all the time. And so yeah, we are kind of programmed to do it that way.
John: Yeah. You don't want to start from ground zero every day.
Brian: You couldn't. There's far too much information coming in and you have to make assumptions and you have to take shortcuts or you wouldn't even be able to make breakfast in the morning. It would be that overwhelming.
Zilpha: But also, when you have the the answer already, and you come across evidence that looks like your answer's actually wrong, it's hard to accept. Because if the answer's in the back of the book, it has to be right!
John: You actually don't think about it as being wrong. Most people would not ever question the back of the book as being wrong.
Zilpha: The back of the book is right. So everything else, that looks like that answer is wrong... must be wrong.
Dustin: You have no reason to question it yet.
Brian: It's actually really unsettling. Like sometimes you'll have a smart kid in the class. He'll say, "Oh yeah, the answer in the back of the book is wrong." And it's like, whoa, I've been trusting this! Crap!
John: I've heard people say that, and then my reaction is usually, "I have no way of evaluating that. I don't even know how you figured that out." Because the goal, as I went through math, was to get the answer in the back of the book! That was the whole objective, right? I wasn't thinking about this in the abstract world of problem solving. It was to hit the notes that were written on the page. I wasn't trying to play music, I was just trying to do what it said on the paper.
Brian: Pass the test, get the grade, so you don't get in trouble. Moving on. It's not about understanding your trigonometry, necessarily.
John: So the paradigm of religion, and particularly the paradigm of Mormonism, is there's a few basic assumptions that the whole thing is built on. And when those assumptions are understood and agreed upon, then the whole system makes perfect sense. And we'll talk about what those assumptions are. It's those sort of things that logicians and some philosophers and mathematicians are very, very interested in.
John: The most classic example to understand that is non-Euclidean geometry. So, the basic assumption—there's some things we prove and there's some, some basic assumptions. And one of those assumptions is that two parallel lines never cross, right? We say that by definition. It's the definition of a parallel line.
John: In non-Euclidean space, that assumption is discarded. It's no longer true. And it can actually—and I'm way over my head here—but using the derived conclusions from throwing that away, you can arrive at a mathematical model that explains some phenomenon in electronics and things better than the space that we normally use.
John: So, there's these underlying assumptions that everything else is built upon, bit by bit by bit by bit, and most people who know the system don't even understand those assumptions. They're just so ingrained. And you usually have to get into graduate school in whatever discipline you're studying to even figure out what the assumptions are that the undergrads were operating on the whole time.
Brian: Photons work exactly like this. Once you get into physics at the level of photons, and you get the double slit experiments, in order to make the calculations work, you have to assume that time travel is possible... and then the calculations work. But assuming time travel is possible at the quantum level is really weird! But that's the way the mathematics works. So you assume it and run with it even if you don't understand it.
John: It's weird, because, first of all, it doesn't jive with our experience. And secondly, we've been told that, we've been told all the time that's not the way it works, not the way it works, not the way it works. And so, if what you're told rhymes with your experience, then you have this "two witness" sort of thing where one reinforces the other.
John: So let's talk about, first of all, the three fundamentals of the Church that we get children saying from the time they're very, very young. We have them parade up in front of everybody else and they say three things. They say, first, "I know the Church is true." Second, "I know Joseph Smith was a prophet." And third, "I know that [insert current king here] is a prophet today." And those three are an extremely powerful trinity. It's an extremely powerful mind trap. And if you assume those three are true, and you follow through with it, it is very hard to dislodge the Church. Because, um, first of all, the Church is true!
John: You'll hear people say this—I heard it at BYU all the time—"I just don't know... we don't know how this will be resolved... but the Church is true."
Zilpha: "It'll all make sense someday."
Dustin: Jehovah's Witnesses have a similar thing. They call it The Truth. They don't call themselves Witnesses amongst themselves. They call it The Truth.
Brian: They don't even call it a church.
Dustin: Yeah. Constantly reinforcing that concept: "Well, it's the truth. There's nothing else to go to because this is the truth." And so that double entendre concept messes with your reality.
John: I got into a debate with some high level FARMS guys about nine years ago, eight years ago, and I pointed out that FARMS never has and never will print anything that contradicts the fundamental whatever of the Church. Therefore they were working backwards. Therefore they weren't scientific. And their answer was "No, we follow the scientific method, it's just that the Church is true, so therefore we cannot find anything to contradict the Church because the Church itself is true." [Laughter]
John: So when one, even somebody very intelligent, is presented with evidence that the Church is not true... they've already fundamentally concluded that the Church is true, ergo the evidence does not prove that the Church is not true because that that conclusion has already been assumed.
Brian: "You're just looking at the evidence wrong!"
John: You're looking at it wrong or, or it's a trick... there is the problem, you know, that Mormonism is always true in every study that hasn't been published. [Laughter] It's always this undiscovered science out there that is going to discover Zarahemla, that's going to establish the Book of Mormon is true, that's going to establish this genetic Lamanite thing.
John: And if you read apologetics, they will actively refer to research that's never been done! It's a trick that their mind is playing on them. They're not... these guys are not evil. Well, some of them might be. Their mind is just finding a way to match the work to the answer in the back of the book, right?
Brian: They've engaged in motivated reasoning. It's terrible thinking, but you find a way to make it fit, no matter what assumptions you discard for the rest of reality, so long as you keep your conclusion, and you'll find a way to make it fit.
Zilpha: And it's motivated by discomfort in the alternative. The cognitive dissonance, the level of threat that you feel when your worldview is threatened. It's real and it's intense and that's what makes people do the reasoning the other way.
Brian: Yeah. It is frightening. You feel like you're cornered, you're trapped. I remember feeling scared when I was confronted with something that quite plainly seemed right when what I was trying to hold seemed quite kooky.
Zilpha: Well, and it doesn't make sense. If you're sitting in the passenger seat and you're looking at the speedometer and the driver says, "No, I'm going 55," you're like, "No, go faster! You're only going 50! I can see what you're saying to me does not make sense. I can see that you're going 50!" Like one of those illusions, like the hag and the pretty lady; if you can only see the one, and somebody else says, no, it's a beautiful woman, you're like, "What you're saying makes absolutely no sense to me. That is a hag." You can't even process it.
John: I think that's a great example. I want to set it aside for a minute. I want to take one step back to what you were talking about, cognitive dissonance. The thing a lot of people leave the church, or leave other things, talk about is dissonance theory, and it's really popular out there right now, but I'm saying this all happens prior to dissonance theory. I'm saying that most members of the Church never get there. They never get to the point that they're feeling any dissonance whatsoever.
Zilpha: I think they all feel dissonance.
John: I disagree. I think that, when it comes to something like evolution, it doesn't even make it through their filters.
Brian: I think I'm with Zilpha on that because a lot of members will talk about, "I had a crisis of faith." I don't know many members that won't say, "Oh, I went through what you went through. You just have to get through it."
John: Yeah. But I think I'm talking about this general population... like, I know you and the IQ level people you tend to interact with, but you've got to take the entire bell curve. [Laughter] You've got to take everybody who's going to Church, all 14 million of them.
Dustin: I don't think they necessarily always think about it, but if they're presented directly with dissonant information, they will experience cognitive dissonance no matter how intelligent they are.
Zilpha: And it will feel threatening.
Brian: Yeah, I agree.
John: If they allow it in. But most—
Zilpha: They don't even have to allow it in! They just have to be confronted with it. And then they have to quickly say, "Enh. I'm not going to deal with that."
John: They have to be confronted with it and they have to process it to some level.
Dustin: Sometimes even if it's a small amount, that's a process and they immediately push it away.
John: I have talked recently to two adults who seem to function well in the world but still do not believe in the theory of evolution. And if you try to approach them about it, they immediately glass over.
Zilpha: That's the cognitive dissonance!
John: What I'm saying is this is pre-cognitive dissonance. They are not even letting it in. They are not even processing. If you gave these guys a basic test on evolution, they couldn't even pass the most... and this is what primary is all about. In Primary, they're not teaching you any apologetics. They are hammering in these a priori assumptions that I'm talking about. Yeah.
Dustin: So they assume it's wrong before you even finish your sentence.
John: For most Mormons, we talk about evolution, they will give you the same answer, which is "it's not pertinent to my Salvation. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all." It's outside of the realm of the...
Zilpha: And they won't even learn about it because it's a waste of their time because they already know it's not real. So reading about it is just... why would you do that? I already know it's not real. Just a bunch of baloney.
John: I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. Years ago when I worked for BYU police, we were doing security at an event, and Hinckley was there. He was the president of Church at the time and he actually opened—this rarely happens—he opened it up to questions from the floor, and a student came down and asked him about evolution. And he just gave some bullshit, I dunno, blah, blah, blah.
John: But I remember going back to the headquarters, whatever we called it, afterwards, and one of these officers, this guy was probably in his mid thirties at the time, and this guy was mad. He was like, "Here you have the prophet, and you can ask him anything you want, and you ask them about this!? That's complete nonsense!" And I'm a college student, and I'm like, "It's a pretty damn good question. I mean, everybody at the university's wondering about it..." But he was upset that somebody would dare even ask the question. That would not even make it through his filter. Because the Church is true! We know that!
John: And if you read Fielding Smith's Man, His Origin and Destiny, it's an entire treaty, 400 pages against evolution, and the fundamental conclusion is "Evolution does not make sense with the gospel, ergo it's not true."
Brian: I'll give him the first half; the premise is right!
John: Because the church is true. Right? And that's why Mormons repeat that to themselves over and over and over and over and over again, because it is a bulwark. It's a wall that keeps out any of those things, that keeps you from even having dissonance. Which is why, of course, they encourage you not to read, they encourage you not to...
Zilpha: Well, an example is your dad, who is aware that there may be problems, but has said, "I don't even want to look into them, because I don't want to learn about them. Because what I'm doing works for me and I like my life and I don't want to threaten that."
Dustin: So your pre-dissonance idea. I think you might have to say that it's dissonance that's already been resolved. Because they've already thought about evolution, they've made their conclusion and then when you bring it up again, they can just go back and say, well, I've already made up my mind about that. It's already resolved. I don't have to do it again.
Zilpha: They didn't have to think very much about it.
John: Yeah, it's the same thing that we do in training all the time. If you go to basic training and then later you're trained as a marksman, it's all about getting you not to think about killing the enemy. That's what the whole thing is about. Because you have a biological aversion to doing that. So the training is all about getting over that and just doing what you're told to do. What we really want is good soldiers who don't think, who don't exercise any moral agency. We just want them to obey the order.
Zilpha: You don't want them to run the other way and get shot in the back too, so you want them to take the first shot. Some people might not have a problem shooting somebody else, but they might run the other way which would be bad.
Dustin: I kind of see your point though. I mean, if you've been cognitively primed enough through your life, like you don't have to think about it and it hasn't entered your consciousness yet to have that cognitive dissonance.
Brian: Right, almost like it's just a keyword or a signal word that you just wall up.
John: Right. Because, you know, I'm not using sort of the model of this guy who goes to church and then he works as a gardener or whatever. Not that gardening is not a great profession, but it's not one that's going to challenge your fundamental worldview very much. But I'm thinking more about like BYU. You can go to BYU and they have... are their scores still really high? I mean nationally, like the average SAT/ACT score. It's a very academic school; the people who go to BYU are not dumb. And if you go to classes at BYU, if you go to 201, 301, or a graduate level class, you're gonna learn the same stuff everybody's learning everywhere else right now. They might throw you some bones every once in a while, but the professors know, if they're gonna send their graduate students out into the real world, that they have to understand the material.
John: And I'll give my franken-BYU professor theory again here, which is if you took a group of 50 professors from BYU, and you just took the part of their mind that's devoted to their discipline, and then you cut that out and then you took the other professors and took the part of their mind devoted to their discipline, you cut that out and then you sewed it all together... the professor at the end would believe nothing about Mormonism. [Laughter]
John: When I was in the linguistics department, these were faithful LDS people, I mean true believing LDS people, and none of them believed in the tower of Babel at all. Because from a linguistic point of view, it's utterly ludicrous. It just cannot be supported. And if you go over to the biology department, nobody believes in Noah's Ark, right? Because they can completely deconstruct it. But the biologists may not spend much time thinking about the tower of Babel. So they just read that portion of the Book of Mormon and they just go on with their lives.
John: And the problem is with Mormonism is there's no discipline out there that you can believe in, and still hold a complete faith. It runs afoul of every single discipline there is out there. From engineering on down. I mean, barges that flipped upside down and are full of cow shit or whatever... it's been a while since I read the book...
Zilpha: Honeybees. [Laughter]
Brian: And the number of gallons of fresh water you'd need... and tapirs...
John: Right, right, right. And God getting mad at building towers to heaven and whatever.
Brian: What, they almost got here! Let's knock it down! [Laughter]
John: My point is you have these smart kids who understand and can tell you and kick back to you what the scientific thinking is, but they've been primed with "The Church is true," and "Thomas Monson is a prophet," and so what you have is a very top down driven system of epistemology, of knowing things, that has no feedback loop whatsoever.
John: So we say, well, the prophet, we're going to keep removed from the populace. The populace does not get to interact with them. We do not want an unscripted interaction with anybody in the 12. Because what we don't want anybody to say is, "Well, this guy sounds like just a normal schmuck." You don't want to ask them about anything that you can evaluate them on!
Brian: "Sounds like a Dodo..."
John: And then people defer up, saying, "Well, this doesn't make sense to me, but the 12 believe..." So that's the third fundamental truth of Mormonism, that the prophet is the true prophet. You just have this deference all the way up. Saying, "Well, I don't know why 13 year old girls can't pass the sacrament, but President Monson is the true prophet, and if God wanted it differently than God could change it. So ergo, I don't have to think about it. I don't have to decide. I don't have to look at that and say that's fundamentally ridiculous.”
Brian: "It's not important to my salvation."
John: "It's not pertinent to my Salvation."
John: The Joseph Smith one is key, and it's a tricky one and it's a trap that I fell into for several years myself. When I would read the Book of Mormon and I'd run into nonsense—now I can't even open it without running into nonsense, but before it would only be once every 10 pages—I would say, "Y'know, that's a little strange... the fact that they're talking about breastplates in the New World is a little weird, y'know... the fact we can't find any stuff like that. But! I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet. Um, and Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon. Ergo the Book of Mormon is true."
Dustin: It's your fallback check.
John: Right. The trick was, when I would learn stuff about Joseph Smith that was a little odd, I'd say, "But Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon. And you can't just produce the Book of Mormon. So the Book of Mormon's true... ergo Joe Smith is true." But I wouldn't ever open and turn the lights on both of those simultaneously. When there were problems with the Book of Mormon I would use "Joseph Smith is a prophet" to bolster that. And then then I would reverse it later. And I use that as example of this sort of thinking, these propositions underlying the Church that people are assuming. Even though those propositions themselves might be contradictory! They'll be pulled out of the quiver and used to fight whatever fight they need to fight at that point, but there doesn't need to be any logical consistency of anything.
Brian: I mentioned the tapirs a second ago, and that's the exact same problem. When they were describing horses in the Book of Mormon and apologists say, "Well, they're tapirs." Well, that's fine until you have a chariot to pull. [Laughter]
Zilpha: Or you look at a tapir and you say, "That ain't no horse!"
Brian: But even if you gave them that, what's pulling the chariot? Like, did they rope up these little piglike animals and... their wheel-less sleds get dragged around in the grass? It's just weird.
Zilpha: We haven't found the evidence... yet!
Brian: You can have each foundation, and each answer can stand in isolation, but not together.
John: Right. So, there are more of these, and if you start analyzing the Church... there's a great one that comes from the temple, which is, "All truth shall be be circumscribed into one great whole!" And this is used, like we mentioned before, by academics to excuse the evidence unfound. That at some point there'll be this theory that will resolve all of these things.
John: So they grasp onto these things and what they'll do—and this is sort of a Ray Comfort thing, you see this more from Evangelicals than you do from Mormons, but Mormons do it also—they will try to find points of confusion in an evidentiary set from science. Then they will try to present science to you as if it is equivalent with religion. And now you're on their court.
Brian: Yeah, Deepak Chopra, same style.
John: So now you're playing by their rules. I was talking to a friend the other day at a party, it was about a month ago, and we were having this very discussion. And, he wouldn't buy my premise that you can't talk somebody out of the Church (we'll talk about this more in a minute). The problem is once you engage them—well, first of all, you want to engage them. You want to bring them into your realm.
John: If you're talking to an apologist or somebody who's like... a bishop who's a lawyer, the first thing they're gonna do is they're going to kick all of your rules out from underneath you. They're going to attack you on issues of metaphysics and epistemology. And they will undermine the theories of knowledge. They'll say, "How do we know anything?" They'll pull out existentialism and postmodernism and all this bullshit that has nothing to do with Mormonism—is contradictory to Mormonism!—but the point is to get you off of your field, to get you out of the court where you control the rules.
John: So you're trying to play basketball with them, and what happens is they are smart enough to not play basketball with you. The apologists and the ones who know what they're doing, they are not going to come down on your court and they're not going to play by your rules. They're not going to engage using logic and reason and and acknowledging fallacies exist and that sort of stuff. They know that they exist and if they'll reference them, which is maddening to you, but they won't actually play in that realm. They're playing football.
John: So, what happens is people leave the Church and are like, "I want to get my friends and relatives out of the Church, but they're not coming onto my basketball court and playing. So I'm going to go down on their field and I'm going to show them that the Church is not true!" But you're no longer playing by your rules. You're playing by their rules, and you don't want to play basketball against the football team. They will bulldoze you over. You cannot engage them in their rules. You cannot engage Mormonism inside Mormonism and prove Mormonism is not true. It cannot be done.
Brian: It's like saying "The world is magical, prove it isn't." And then anytime you find a contradiction, say, "It's magic!" There's no way around that kind of circular thinking.
John: And I've been engaging apologists long enough that I can take any argument against Mormonism and I can immediately kick you back an apologist response. Now, the thing about the apologist response is, you cannot knit them all together. Like, if you tried to derive a theory of the universe by reading the FARMS books, you wouldn't be able to because the arguments they use against the arguments against the church are inconsistent, incoherent, and they don't line up. They might seem good in that one article, but you can turn 15 pages to the next apologetic thing and they'll be using it different. So in this part, they'll be using a particular method of science. And this part they'll be dismissing that method of science. It's not consistent.
John: So, you can't engage Mormonism by their rules. It seems deceptively easy to go in there and do so. But they have these little... assumptions.
Zilpha: It's the answer in the back of the book problem. A teacher in the front of the classroom where the students already buy into the idea of, "that's a teacher and I'm supposed to listen to them"—a teacher can change preconceived notions. It's tough, but they can do it. But if you're coming in as someone without authority...
Brian: Well, it's a willingness to listen problem.
Zilpha: Exactly. It's the willingness to listen.
John: That's good. That's where I wanted to go next. So given this dismal view I've painted the world... which I think is actually dismal. I mean if you take the 7 billion people on this planet and ask what percentage of those reject the metaphysical thinking that they grew up with, it's a tiny, tiny fraction. It's outside a couple standard deviations. Most people will never—they may not obey, like, you know, you'll find all sorts of Catholics wearing condoms. But that doesn't mean they're rejecting Catholicism as a metaphysical system or the authority of the church. And of course they're more progressive than Mormons are, so they're better able to reject the local authority of the church, but just not reject the church.
John: And even examples that are being bandied around, like Martin Luther... Martin Luther, when he posted the 95 theses, he wasn't rejecting Christianity or the idea in the afterlife or anything like that. He was just saying, there's these problems.
Zilpha: He wanted to reform the church, right? He wanted to keep the same basic church, but reform it into a better one.
Brian: "Hey, we've gone off the rails. Let's correct these 95 items."
John: Right. So when we get like New Order Mormons and all sorts of people in the middle, that's what they're usually doing. When people talk about reformation of the Church—be more tolerant to gays or whatever—they're focusing in on a particular issue, but the fundamental assumption that the Church is a worthwhile organization, is true in some sense, or should be promoted, is not being questioned at all.
John: And that that goes back to that apologetic trick of not getting rid of that core assumption that the Church is true. So if you say the Church is true and you run into some little facet of it that's wrong, well that might be in need of reformation, maybe we're not ready for it yet... you know, like a lot of people say about the blacks and the Priesthood. "Oh, that was just... those were just the policies of men," and there's all these little rhetorical ways to get around it without saying the Church is not true.
Brian: I was just thinking about a kind of a nod to some of the church members who aren't Young Earth Creationists because I spent a lot of time believing evolution was actually a correct model. Even as a believing member. And I just figured, well there's some explanation. It's coming. God'll tell me later I guess, but quite clearly evolution is correct, but I'm not gonna let it bother me. Because it will be explained later. I'm fine.
Brian: And like, I didn't even realize that, what is it, D&C 77? Verse 6, that actually says that the earth is 6,000 temporal years old. Like, it's explicitly stated doctrine. I had no idea. I didn't know we were required to be young Earth creationists! I didn't realize I was an apostate far before I was! Maybe that's why I left. [Laughter]
Dustin: Oh, speaking of evolution... evolutionarily, we needed to take these concepts from a really young age, whatever they were, taught from our elders. our parents, passed down. And we needed to take them and take them seriously so we can build a world construct so we could be more successful. And I think that's why it's harder. It's a deep part of our brain. It's hard to uproot when it's been built from such a young age. It's natural to assimilate into your tribe and that's what we were all doing as we grew up in these religions.
Zilpha: And I mean, it's literally your world. That is your world that was constructed for you and that you lived in.
John: These things have their roots in group hunting and mating strategies, and it didn't do you any good to reject the mating strategy of the tribe. So, you're kind of hardwired to accept the values because there's good reward in that.
Dustin: I think that's why there's an easy out, to just look the other way. Like you're saying, a Catholic who uses a condom, or a Jack Mormon. They can still believe some of the concepts but just kind of do their own thing at the same time because they're not really rejecting all they were taught.
John: They're rejecting small pieces without ever looking at the whole, which leads to the point Zilpha was making.
John: If this is the case, and it's so rare for people to reject their religion, then how did any of us get out? or how does anybody get out? We metaphorically all had this sort of awakening, like a Buddhist—and I'll give credit, the first person I saw who really made this clear to me was Tal Bachman—which is: you have to decide, by whatever means necessary, that the Church could possibly not be true. You have to give that little tiny bit. You have to give room for a little tiny bit of doubt, right?
John: So from what we've been talking about, given this paradigm that's forcing us into a certain parallax, a certain view of the world that appears completely true from from our perspective... so from that perspective of the believer who can look at evolutionary evidence that is prima facie evidence that the Doctrine & Covenants is wrong—
Brian:—Overwhelmingly multifaceted, multidisciplinary, concrete, demonstrable evidence. There's no getting around that.
John: But these underlying world assumptions, "the Church is true," and that all this stuff will be resolved, allow one to go on and resolve that dissonance. I think one of you made the point that the dissonance has been resolved, and so, there is no problem. They don't have to think about it.
John: So, bringing in these little elements that demonstrate the illogical... you're just kicking at one point of the lattice, but the lattice itself is holding the whole system together and the problem is they cannot have in their minds at all times all of the points of law. If the mind were a huge multiprocessor and then you could suddenly kick 10,000 pieces of evidence at them at the same time, then maybe they'd go, "Oh, yeah!"
John: But they can't do it because in their mind, wherever they shine the flashlight, they say, "Oh yeah, there's a problem there, but I know everything else in the dark room is fine." Then they shine the flashlight somewhere else: "Oh, I know that's a problem. Everything else in the dark room is fine." And the problem is you can't turn the lights on.
John: So at some point, the only way to leave the Church, and I've seen this, this happens usually one of two ways. It happens either emotionally, or it happens intellectually, and it depends on your personality. An emotional type person is somebody who sees Prop 8, and they say, "There's something fucked up about that," and then that kicks them out of the paradigm. And once they're out of the paradigm, It's like flipping the lights on. Then they can see this is all a great big load of bullshit.
Zilpha: You almost have to back into the light switch, like you do at Brian's house. [Laughter] He has a light switch that's like, butt-level, and you always back into it and turn the light off... but it's almost like an accident. Because you're in the paradigm, you can't say, "Oh, I'm going to see what's outside of the paradigm!" It's just like you back into the light switch and, "Whoa, whoa! That is a new way of seeing things!"
Brian: Yeah. When I found my way out, I wasn't looking for trouble. I was a believing, tithe-paying member, and I stumbled across something. And in addition to the analogy with the light switch, with the flashlight and all the little items in the room, I think that's why members who were very invested and then leave, spend so much time going through all of it, just unable to believe that that every single piece of this was broken and screwed up. You just, you can't believe yourself when you check... "Here, yep, that's wrong... yep, that's wrong... yep, that's wrong... oh my God, everything's wrong!"
Dustin: You're like on a discovery quest and you're finding more and more...
Brian: "This can't be. Was it really that bad all along!? How did I miss this!?"
John: Yeah. It wouldn't be Mormon Expression if I didn't mix a lot of metaphors, but, I remember one time when I was a kid, at Family Home Evening, and my dad had strung string all over the room, and it was connected here and there, and we were blindfolded, and we had to try to find our way across the room, through the string. I remember that when you took the blindfold off and you could see what you'd been doing, it was just this fascinating thing, because with your sight you can immediately make a path across the room. But blindfolded, it was very difficult. When the lights came on, you could see how complex that was, and you could see the path through it and the simplicity. It was fascinating. And that goes to that ex-Mormon trait some people have to just read and read and read and read, because it's just like they're finding one thing after the other, after the other after the other.
John: But to keep using our paradigm, the problem is, with each individual in that darkened room, the light switch is in a different place and you cannot predict individually where their light switch is, even if it's there. So the problem we go back to, to go to the original question of "How do I convince my brother that the Church is not true?" The problem is you do not know where his light switch is. And I’ve met enough ex-Mormons to know it's all over the place! I've heard people leave the Church for things that don't bother me at all.
John: I'll give you one: the downtown mall, the, whatever it's called, City Creek? Does not bother me one bit. Not one bit. It doesn't bother me today. Wouldn't bother me then.
Zilpha: It's consistent with other things that the Church has done in the past.
Brian: That's right, serving God and Mammon.
John: I actually think it's a good move for the Church. I think downtown centers need upscale malls. You don't want to build shitty, crappy malls downtown. They're going to go out to the suburbs if they want to go to Nordstrom, right? And you want to attract high end people. You want money downtown. That's what every downtown's doing. And so it makes sense for the Church to invest in it. The Church already owned all that property. They own all the property around there. They've been doing land investment forever. To me, it's just not... but to other people, that the Church would spend billions of dollars on property development, really rubs them the wrong way. And I'm not saying they're wrong.
Zilpha: I have another crazy example. I met someone who left the church because the church fired their janitors and she had to go clean toilets. And to her that was like, "This cannot be the true Church if I have to pay tithing and clean toilets!" [Laughter]
Dustin: That's a great light switch. You could almost ask it that way: "What was your light switch?" It's cool. I like it.
John: So, you can't predict what the other person's light switch is, and if you try to push them with your issues, you often cause them to retrench. It's sort of an asshole thing to do, to go to people and tell them that their religion is wrong because of X, Y, and Z, especially if point X, Y, Z does not bother them. But it's the hardest thing to tell somebody who just left the religion not to go do that, because you just want to tell all your friends and family, "Oh, but look at this! You'll see it, right!?"
Brian: "Hey, is this a good letter to send out to all my family?" [Laughter]
Dustin: Well, I wanted to do it too! You just want to really bad because you feel so bamboozled.
Zilpha: Well, all of a sudden, it seems so obvious! So you think, well if I just, if I can just explain how I see things now, they'll get it too!
Brian: It's the duty of everyone to warn his neighbor, right? Like, oh, that's what I do!
John: Yeah, I think it's a natural human instinct to protect other people from fraud. It's sounding the alarm. When a tiger comes into the clearing, the one monkey screams. We have that in our genetics. But the problem is, for the most part, it backfires. It is the wrong thing to do, to go tell people why you think the Church isn't true. By wrong I mean it doesn't work.
Zilpha: And if they ask you, which is rare, at least in our experience—they usually avoid the subject altogether—but if they ask you, it's generally because they want to argue with you, not because they want to understand where you are.
John: And they usually won't do that very long. I mean, that goes back to that primer. They've been primed: follow the prophet, follow the prophet. They've been chanting these things for years and years and years, literally in this case, literally chanting it. And they're impervious to that. But you know, we're all smug sitting on the gold, and all of us have a chink somewhere in our underbelly. But we don't know where that chink is. If you could find it on somebody, you might be able to.
John: But leaving the Church is emotionally difficult, leaving behind your core root, and for some people it's so unpleasant of an experience that they will go back. Even for that. You can go to any ward and find people who left the Church for a while and went back. There's tons. One time I tried to sort of guesstimate at what the rewash rate is. I bet it's about a third, about a third of all the people who leave the Church will eventually go back to it. It's high.
Dustin: When your whole community is tied up in it... it's your whole life.
Zilpha: Yeah.
Brian: You think it's that high?
John: I think it's really high.
Brian: I don't think it's that high. I can't think of anyone I know who's done that.
Dustin: I think if it was that high, it's falling.
John: You've been in the ex-Mormon world for...
Brian: Like four years?
John: All right. So four years ago, when you have a big ex-Mormon picnic, how many people would show up?
Zilpha: But the number of people... if you know people, I don't know anybody who's gone back. And I know hundreds of ex-Mormons.
John: I know hundreds of ex-Mormons too, but the community, the ex-Mormon community has stayed pretty constant.
Brian: Sure. But that's different from going back. Not showing up at picnics anymore doesn't mean they've gone back to Church.
Zilpha: There are people that, if you go into Church, and you express some doubt, and you're a member of a ward, then maybe the Bishop will say, "I've had doubts, but I resolved them." But usually it's not like, "Yeah, I left the Church because it was obviously not true, but I'm back because it was too hard out there in the world."
John: There's a book, if you challenge me on it, I'll find it in here, it has a social study out of... there it is, "The social life of Latter Day Saints", social study out of Brigham Young University that says that 80% of all members of the Church go inactive for at least year or more. So it depends on "go back."
John: ...And you guys are going to True Scotsman me and keep narrowing it down until you win... [Laughter]
Zilpha: But I think those people are more like, you know, probably have issues with depression, or...
John: You talk to ex-Mormons, and they'll say, "I read D&C 132 and I immediately quit going to Elders Quorum!" But you can find 50,000 people in this state who read D&C 132 and went onto an online dating site because they were looking for a second wife. Right? [Laughter] So people go both ways on this stuff. And I mean, that just underlines the point. You can't predict how somebody's gonna react. D&C 132 is something that drives a lot of people out of the Church, and we've been through it; there's some crazy shit in that section! But there are people who read that and it speaks to them! It makes them believe even more!
Zilpha: Or, it just doesn't bother them, or they process it through the lens that they were given in Seminary, which is, oh, this is talking about about eternal marriage. And anything that sounds a little different... well, you know, nowadays this is how we interpret it.
John: So what's to be done?
Brian: I've came to a conclusion myself quite some time ago. That door can really only be unlocked from the inside. The best I've figured out: live a good life, be happy. You know the saying, ascribed to Marcus Aurelius: "live a good life; if there are gods and they're just, they won't care how devout you've been."—I don't think it's actually his quote—"If there are gods and they are unjust, you should not want to worship them. And if there are no gods, then you will have lived a good life and live on in the memory of your friends and family." et cetera.
Dustin: It's kind of like that door opening trick, where if you open it for them and they walk in, it's the same room they were already in and "No, no, open the door for me!" and they walk in, it's the same room, but if they open it, then they could see it for what it is. I'm just making an illustration here.
John: It's the reason we don't spend any money at all advertising Mormon Expression. It's out there, and people who need it, find it. But advertising it, like on Facebook... we could put our ads there, so people who are Mormons would click on it... it would do no good. In my opinion.
Zilpha: If they already believe, they'll click on it and they'll be like, "Ew, this is an ex-Mormon thing."
John: And I've had hundreds of people tell me saying that they actually listened to the podcast and found it very offensive. And then a year later, something had clicked for them and they came back and they were ready for it. And it's not anything that we did. It's that they turned the lights on!
Zilpha: Well, it was the f-bomb, John. Turning them off with the f-bomb! [Laughter]
Dustin: So I have my own idea of a smoking gun. I know it's not a smoking gun, but just from my experience of leaving Jehovah's Witnesses, is that it comes in two ways. And the first one is, we're already known, so we can't tell them anything. So if you've already gone down the road of, oh, you left, then they can't trust you anymore. You're the outsider who's left. But if they trust you, then you can ask questions. If they're open to and they say things, don't ever tell them anything, but ask questions.
John: Yeah, yeah. I think we need to be there and that's sort of what the podcast is about. It's there for people who are ready to process that.
Zilpha: It's the teacher for people who are ready to listen to that teacher.
John: Because once they made that assumption that maybe there could be something wrong with the Jehovah's Witness Church...
Zilpha: ...then maybe I should start listening to somebody else.
John: Sorry. It's not church.
Zilpha: Sorry. Number two.
Dustin: Go ahead, keep talking. I forgot, I'll remember in a second.
Zilpha: The first one is they have to trust you. And the second one... is that they...
Brian: Oh, the pressure is just making it worse. [Laughter]
Dustin: That's okay. I'll think about it in a minute after the silver.
Zilpha: That is the key: to be available and to have the information available for people who are ready... yes, Dustin!
Dustin: Yeah, I got it! The other thing is, even if they do, even if you're already on the road of "they don't trust you," so you can't ask them questions, you're not going to show them any information, you can't turn on the lights for them or whatever like that. But, you can, if it's a spouse or if it's a friend or something like that, I think exposing them to the world is a huge help. Because when you're in this tight community—Jehovah's Witness is super tight, Mormons are super tight—you have limited exposure to the real world. And so, just exposing them to to people outside of the group, that they're normal people, it might trigger something in their own head to think about.
John: Now that I agree with. I can think of 10 or 20 people off hand that I've met who I first met because their spouse dragged them out to a Mormon Expression event. And they look like scared, shivering little chihuahuas there. And then they realize that these people are not strange. They're not something to be feared.
Zilpha: They might be strange... but they're not dangerous, at least.
Brian: They're not gross and angry and mean.
John: To your point, that was them looking at the outside world and realizing that something they've been told about the outside world wasn't true. But it wasn't us going in and saying, "Your paradigm is off." The funky thing is it's like they're at that magic show and they're sitting in the audience, and they refuse to acknowledge the illusion, and you're sitting on the side stage. And this goes back to the parallax.
Dustin: You've got to change their perspective!
John: And they say, “You're just looking at it from another perspective. From my perspective, the illusion is true.” and what we keep saying is, "You're right! But if you come over here, you will see how they're sawing the lady in half!" Because you can see it clearly from here. It's like some of those illusions that there's YouTube videos of, where somebody built a box, like one of those eternal box rhombus things in their backyard, and then you shift a little bit and you immediately see that this is not what it appears to be. But the people who are standing there, the people who are chained in Plato's cave, they refuse. And they say, "You are just looking at it from another point of view. You have this problem."
Zilpha: Not even just another point of view: "You're not looking at it correctly because this is the truth. What I see is the truth. So you obviously can't see."
Dustin: It's so frustrating! Because us ex-members... I've sat over there! I know what it looks like there! No, seriously! You've gotta see this!
John: And that's the argument that the atheists try to make for something like, "Well, you know, you just believe in one more God" or the little cartoons on Youtube: "not a stamp collector." you know. That's not a hobby.
Brian: Yeah, non-stamp-collecting, terrific channel.
John: So, it's tough because from their particular point of view—and it's not like we are all intellectual saints. We've seen the side of the trick, but we're not any smarter than they are. We've just seen the side of the trick. And that's why this is so insidious, because we've been able to jettison those, those conclusions. So, if somebody can come up with a better way than what Dustin's offering, you know, that we have to show them that there's an alternative world out there in terms of behavior. We have to sort of circumvent the system.
Brian: Comedy.
John: And it's not through a direct attack.
Brian: I'm totally serious about comedy, by the way. The atheist comedians like Richard Vase and Eddie Izzard and Jim Jefferies and these other guys that just, they look at religion from such a funny perspective. It's disarming, and you can't help but laugh... depending on your sensitivity. That's the best way to get to get to those conclusions, I think.
Zilpha: Uh, yeah, I couldn't have handled any of that as a believer. There was no way.
Dustin: Well, I just think you have to have that constant exposure to the real world and, I mean, they may never leave the religion, but that exposure to the real world will make them, in my opinion, more tolerable to you and to the rest of the world. And to your perspective.
John: I agree. But I think you're in an arms race against religions. Religions are evolving entities and they evolve to take into account the real world and they'll shift their doctrines. So, it is... I think you're right.
Zilpha: But the more you can help expose people to other perspectives... you don't have to frame it as "the real world"...
John: How does that work for you? I mean, I'm just really pessimistic about it. I don't think it works.
Zilpha: It does work, but usually they have to be willing to look at different perspectives, and that's the problem.
John: Because some people say, "Well, just live a good life." Right? But every morning I get up, I go to work, I start my work day at home, and I go in to make a cup of coffee. From my relatives' point of view, I am doing something that is immoral. So, they will define the world their way. I cannot convince people out of Mormonism by "living a good life" because they have defined my life to be wicked.
Zilpha: You can't live a good life and drink coffee in the morning.
John: And that's where the exposure, I think, affects a certain amount of people. But there are other people who say, "I will not watch anything other than G rated movies."
Dustin: Well, I'm not talking about them. I'm just saying like exposure to the real world. Something outside of the group! Because if you're only in the ingroup, you don't have any other concepts outside of that. Invite them to work parties, if you have friend that's not a member, invite them to go over with you today. They need to be exposed to other ideas outside of their reinforced childhood, things that have been taught from since they were born.
Brian: It sounds a little paternalistic. Not to like, butt you in the head with the idea, but, "what they need is..." Who am I to decide what they need?
Zilpha: Well, and most people have exposure to the real world. Once they become adults and they get into the working world, there are nonmembers there, and they may have to go out of state or whatever. They're exposed. Or they go on a mission and they're exposed to all these different people...
John: Well, I remember, I was probably 30 before I was ever at a work party where there was alcohol because I worked in Utah and there was no alcohol. And then I would be at some event and I would leave, I would go eat and then leave an hour later assuming that everybody else was drunk out of their minds two hours later, where if I'd stuck around through the whole thing, I would have seen that people weren't behaving any differently. So what I'm saying is, it's very easy in this whole lattice that's around, to not see those things.
John: So, the basic conclusion is, um, what's the saying? You don't wrestle a pig in the mud because the pig likes it. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it. It's that sort of thing. When you try to attack their religion, you are reinforcing it. And I think I saw on Facebook the other day, there's nothing happier than a Christian who thinks they're being persecuted. And if you're playing into that role for them, you're not going to get that zen moment that we're looking for, flipping on the light and having instant Karma. It's an awakening you probably cannot produce.
Brian: No, they're going to shine their flashlight on the persecution piece of the puzzle and be like, "See, you're persecuting me! You've just proven my point!"
John: So now, given this dismal thing, what should we do? I think... be there. I think that we're trying to help them for the people who, who have awakened,
Zilpha: Well, and you never want to make them feel threatened—
Brian:—or belittle them.
John: We're still using "them." They're so cute!
Zilpha: They need to confident enough around you that they would be willing to listen. Because if you say something that's threatening, they'll just put up their wall.
Dustin: I just think more world—going back to my point—more worldly challenge will give them a different perspective. And you can't challenge that. But other people can. And when other people challenge their worldview, other people that aren't Mormons, then I think it slowly starts to happen. By challenging, not religious-wise, but just challenging their worldview. Just a little perspective outside of, way outside of the regular paradigm.
John: Take them to a movie, go to an art museum... but you don't want to point out and say "See!? Minute 23:12, see how that displayed the religion was false!?"
Zilpha: "Did you notice how nice that guy was? And he's an atheist!"
John: So I guess I go back to the challenge of helping build the communities that people can have a soft landing to. Because when that moment, that moment of awakening happens, there is this short timeframe—and this where I was going before—where you can reframe it a la my father and fall back in.
Zilpha: And say, "Ooh, that was scary! I'm not going to look at that anymore!"
John: And there have been so many people... after watching the community for a long time—ex-Mormons like to drink. Most of them don't drink to excess, but they like to drink. I have encountered people who go to their first scary ex-Mormon party, see a lot of alcohol, and they never go back. Because it is so devilish to them; it is so Satanic what's happening. And I like to drink, I'm not trying to talk people out of that, but we don't necessarily have all the soft structures that will help people to go to.
Zilpha: That's the point of something like the ice skating that we're doing in a couple of weeks, or the family picnics, where there isn't alcohol and there's families and there are children and it looks more like what the people who are coming out of the Church directly are used to seeing.
Brian: I was going to bring alcohol. [Laughter] Just joking.
John: ...You wonder why all those ex-Mormons have those big 32 ounce sodas. Why do they all love soda so much? [Laughter] So, alright. I didn't mean to turn it preachy but I guess that's what I do. Um, yeah. I think don't give up hope, I think the thing that we're seeing, the change we're seeing in the world is more and more of these patterns, these systems of belief are becoming more and more ridiculous. The Church is more ridiculous now than it was in 1960 because science has moved forward. Our understanding of humanity—
Zilpha: And it's so easy once they're ready for that light switch, once they bump the light switch. All of the information is out there at their fingertips. They can find what they're looking for, when they're ready.
John: Some of these absurd ideas can only go so long. I mean, the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and by 1978 they were just mopping the floors at that point. It hit the news all over today that the Boy Scouts are seriously considering reversing the ban on gays. It's inevitable that people will have that paradigm questioned. And that's the key element.
Zilpha: It's not inevitable, but we hope that the trend continues.
John: Well, it is inevitable, but, like I was saying before, the church will evolve and adapt.
Zilpha: And believers will become more and more entrenched and have more and more babies.
John: It seems to be the eternal cycle. I don't know. But Mormons aren't winning the war of entrenchment and more babies. It's the Muslims these days by far.
Brian: There are more Muslim babies born every year than there are members of the Church.
John: All right. On that happy note...
Brian: Oh, I mean, babies of Muslim parents. Babies don't actually have a religion.
John: Pretty soon heaven's gonna run out of Muslim babies, and then pure and delightsome babies will be born to the Muslims. That's what I was told in Seminary. [Laughter]
Brian: No, I thought we were already in the last days. We were the great ones!
John: It reminds me, I knew a guy 16 years ago I worked with who put zero money in a 401k because he thought it was silly because Jesus was coming back soon.
Dustin: I didn't put any money in a 401k, not until like five years ago. “It's a waste of money, because the end of the world is going to come any moment.” It's not blanket across the board, but typically.
John: So, um, yeah. So maybe for a discussion on the board, I want to hear what everybody's Zen moment was. What was the awakening moment? For me it was, it was polygamy.
Zilpha: Mine was the devil.
John: Yours was the Book of Abraham...?
Zilpha: Well, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham and then the devil, and then the Moroni's promise, realizing that you first had to believe in Jesus to make that promise real, and did I believe in Jesus? And that was sort of like, well, how do I know that?
John: Brian, what was your light switch?
Brian: The problem of evil.
Dustin: Mine was reading Joseph Smith's No One Knows My History, which brings me to my other point! That's what I'm saying. Exposure to other religions. Because when you read other religious stuff, it's safe. Because like, of course they're crazy, but there's similarities in all religions. And your mind isn't shot when you're reading a different religion... just saying, it's possible.
Zilpha: What about all of you guys in the audience?
Audience Member: Prop 8.
Audience Member: Book of Abraham.
Audience Member: Joseph Smith, trying to get into Nancy Rigdon.
John: Oh, yeah, Nancy Rigdon. He tried to get with her but didn't make it.
John: Oh, you're still in?
Audience Member: I've got a flashlight! What do you mean? [Laughter]
Zilpha: She hasn't bumped into the light switch yet!
Audience Member: Polyandry.
Audience Member: Mine was seeing my best friend leave and nothing happened to him.
Zilpha: Nothing bad happened to the ex-Mormon...!
John: There's always a counter example. He said he saw his best friend leave and nothing happened, but I mean that goes to Dustin's point. Did your best friend ever try to...
Audience Member: Sort of, he tried to share.
John: Was he a dick about it? A little bit? Kinda?
Audience Member: At the time, I thought, but... [Laughter]
John: All right, well as always, the discussion continues on the website at mormonexpression dot com.