Engaging & Refuting Mormonism w/James R. White

Welcome and Introduction to the Conversation

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and tonight I am happy to be joined with Dr. James White. He is the president of Alpha and Omega Ministry, or? Director, director of ministry.

There we go. Director, richest president. There we go. I'm not sure about the official terminology, but he's over there at Alpha and Omega Ministry, and I'm sure everyone is familiar with his work, his debates, which I have lost count, but I'm sure he'll remind me in just a few moments if he remembers.

I don't know, he's 181, 181.

181, that's insane. I'm convinced that you are a cyborg, and you don't go to sleep.

I'm an old Scotsman now, that's all.

All that you require is just to be plugged in and charged until the green light goes on, and then you're sent back out to the mission field. I wish, I wish. That's right. So if you're amazed at all of the work that Dr. White has done and is doing, he does that without coffee.

So right there is evidence for the existence of God, for you atheists who might be listening. But just real quick, so before we jump into our topic, I just want to let folks know I've been reached out, folks have been reaching out to me expressing interest in learning presuppositional apologetics in a more formal way.

There are many different resources that folks can check out. For example, there's Dr. White's material, of course, Jeff Durbin's material on the Apologia Studios YouTube channel. And I participated in their academy, which you can check out.

There's five 20, 23 minutes or so lectures that I give on unpacking the ins and outs of presuppositionalism. And I have a five day or five week course that I teach on my website that folks can sign up for if you go to revealedapologetics .com, you can click the Presupp U menu and you can RSVP for the course that I offer there.

That's a way to learn presupp more formally and it's a way to support the ministry as well. So that'd be greatly appreciated if folks check that out. That's at revealedapologetics .com. All right, well, without further ado, let's jump into our topic for this evening.

What Mormonism Claims About Restoration and Apostasy

We're gonna be talking about Mormonism, how to engage Mormonism. We're gonna talk about that generally and then make some presuppositional application with respect to Mormonism a little bit later in this discussion.

So Dr. White, folks who know you know that you got into apologetics very early on and you've had, you always talk about your story of those Mormons that, was it Reese? And what was the other, what was the other?

Elders Reed and Reese. Reed and Reese, very good. So I'm sure folks would already be familiar with that, but folks know that you have a great experience in this area. Why don't you unpack for beginners?

I'm a teacher, so there might be some students who'd be listening as well. What is Mormonism? And then we'll kind of go from there and move a little deeper into the discussion.

Well, most people are familiar with the Mormons from the two young men that come knocking on your door, maybe two young women too, actually. That's true. But Mormonism is one of the largest American originated religions, officially founded April 6th, 1830.

So it is really a very American religion in the sense that it has struggled to become super global. It's not that there aren't Mormons outside the United States, but the vast majority are within the United States.

They've had some areas of growth like some of the Pacific Islands, Samoa, places like that, that they've had some odd foothold that they've established there. But really in many ways, it remains an American religion.

It is of course famous because of some very well-known Mormons, Mitt Romney, other Romney that was, I think the governor of what was it, Michigan, I think, something along those lines. Anyways, Mormons have always emphasized service in patriotic duty.

And so there've been a lot of Mormons in the military services, in government, things like that. But the key issue for Mormonism is it claims to be the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In fact, the current prophet doesn't want their people to use the term Mormon or Mormonism.

That's not gonna work. It's too late. I mean, you have the Book of Mormon, one of their four canonical books of scripture. They're not gonna get rid of that name, but that's the current push anyways. And the primary church is currently based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

There are probably 200 to 220 offshoot groups. Most are very small. The largest is called the RLDS Church, but even they've changed their name recently. They were infected by Protestant liberalism and now are just sort of falling apart.

But when I first started studying the Mormons, they were in a period of rapid growth. They went from about 3 million around 1980 to currently around 18 million. And in the mid -1980s, the average Southern Baptist church had 274 members.

And in an average week, 273 Southern Baptists became Mormons. So when you figure that out, that's one church. How many?

Can you repeat that number again? How many Southern Baptists?

In around 1984, 1985, the average Southern Baptist church had 274 members. And in an average week, 273 Southern Baptists became Mormons, converted to Mormonism. So that's one church wholesale, 52 churches worth per year were converting to Mormonism.

Those numbers have dropped significantly over the past 20 years. And we could speculate about a lot of the reasons for that. I know what a lot of the reasons for that are. But Mormonism is struggling now to identify itself.

When I first started witnessing the Mormons, when we first started going out to the Easter pageant of the LDS church in Mesa, Arizona, I can show you a great picture. In fact, I may, since I have the ability to do these things now.

There is the, we do have the technology.

Yeah, I realized that you don't, and I don't want to make you feel badly about this at all, brother.

I could show pictures if I wanted to. It just takes a little work. I'm not very computer savvy, even though many people think I am.

Oh, okay, well, if you say so, there we go. I just need to de-maximize something I do wanna show you a little bit later on. But just a matter of week, a few weeks ago, I was, had the opportunity, having come back from Salt Lake City, where we did a debate up there.

Did you see the debate on, is ethics possible without God? Yes.

I did. That was excellent, and Jeff did an excellent job as well.

And keep in mind, Jeff's mom's lung had collapsed the night before, and he had just changed his flight plans to rush home the next morning, and she died a few days later, and he had the opportunity of leading her to the Lord.

That's awesome. During that time. So that was incredible. And I just thought he was on fire. He was. I love that man. I'm so proud of the role I've had in his life, and was so proud to have that opportunity to do that with him.

But here I am with my two oldest granddaughters. Cadence is on the left there, and Clementine's on the right. And we were out at the Easter pageant, passing out tracts to the Mormons. I am very, very proud to mention that last year I saw a picture of Clementine witnessing to an LDS police officer out there in Mesa.

And I was up in Cedar City, Utah, delivering a... I just delivered a lecture on the Trinity there in a very, very, very Mormon area. And it had gone really, really well. And I talked with a family that had come out of Mormonism because of Alpha Omega Ministries and Apology of Church.

And I was super encouraged. We're really seeing the fruit of 40 years of ministry now. This is Alpha Omega's 40th year. And I'm just meeting more and more people who have come out of Mormonism, out of Jehovah's Witnesses, and other things over those years.

And it's truly a blessing. But I saw this picture of Clementine speaking to this police officer, and I started running some numbers. And I realized she was only 12 years younger than I was when I first stood on that corner and witnessed to an LDS cop at the LDS Eastern.

That is an awesome full circle moment there, I'm sure.

That is a full circle moment where your heart is just full. It really, really, really is. So to say that I'm proud of my grandchildren is... Well, and my daughter and son-in-law who are raising them in the fear and admonition of the Lord is a fantastic thing.

So Mormonism claims to be the restored church of Jesus Christ. Now, I've written a number of books on Mormonism, Letters to a Mormon Elder, Is the Mormon My Brother? I've witnessed more than 5 ,000 LDS missionaries personally face-to-face over the years, both at the General Conference of the Mormon Church, which is first weekend in April, first weekend in October.

For 18 years, we went up there for all of those before the King James only shot us down. They're the ones that ended all of that.

Their billboards are probably bigger than everyone else's. I'm sure they make a very, a lot of noise.

They poisoned the atmosphere and you can't expect the Mormons to differentiate between them and us. And they literally would stand there. I listened to them. I have video of them standing there and there's lines of Mormons going into the General Conference and they're yelling at them.

It shouldn't be Mormon, it should be moron. And they think that's witnessing. So it just became, it was a lot of effort to either drive or fly all the way to Salt Lake City and to be there and stuff like that.

They just ruined the opportunity. And so we did get a chance to do it in October of 2019. And we were really looking forward to April of 2020 because that was going to be the 200th anniversary of the supposed first vision of Joseph Smith.

And we were really excited about that. But there was no General Conference in April of 2020. The Mormons went into hiding during COVID and they went totally electronic and nobody met. And so we didn't get a chance to do that type of thing.

But anyway, the LDS Church claims that the Christian Church ceased to exist within a generation or two of the apostles. That the apostles have been given a special priesthood authority. They did not somehow pass that on to the next generations.

So the Christian Church went into apostasy for over 1700 years. And then on a spring day in 1820, Joseph Smith was concerned about what church he should join. He had visited and been a member of the Methodist Sunday School, the Presbyterians.

And according to the LDS scriptures, a revival was going on in upstate New York at that time. And there were many revivals in upstate New York then. And he was very much desirous of knowing what church to join.

And so he went out into what today is called the Sacred Grove and he began to pray. And a force of darkness overcame him. And then he struggled against it. And as he looked up, he saw a pillar of light and he saw two beings in the pillar of light and one motioned to the other and said, this is my beloved son, hear him.

And so he asked what church he should join. He was told he should join none of them. All their creeds are an abomination. All their professors were corrupt. And that he would be visited and told what to do.

Over the next couple of years, he receives a visitation from an angel Nephi or Moroni, depends on which story you read. And he is led to golden plates. He is given spectacles by which he can translate these golden plates.

These become the Book of Mormon, which is printed in, I think, late 1829, as I recall. And this leads to the founding of the LDS Church, April 6th, 1830, which by the way, according to Mormon belief, is also the actual date of the birth of Christ, not December 25th.

Just thought you might wanna know that. And then Yes, so the Book of Mormon, then Mormonism begins to spread. The Book of Mormon is their primary revelation. But then Joseph, as a prophet, claims to be able very, very much into tongue speaking and healings and things like that.

And he claims the ability to receive revelations. And so they begin writing down these revelations that he gets. And at first, they're called the Book of Commandments, first published in 1833. And that then, in 1835, is changed to the Doctrine and Covenants, which is the name that it bears today.

And you need to understand that the modern church, the modern church is very different from the original LDS Church. It has changed a lot in my lifetime. When I first started witnessing to Mormons, the 12-year-old kids would come up to me and argue theology.

They knew what they believed. If I was wearing a cross on my lapel or something like that, they would come up and say, if your kid was stabbed to death, would you wear a bloody knife around your neck?

Because they don't use the cross. If you've ever looked at the top of a Mormon war chapel, there's no cross up there. Sure. But they knew what they believed. They knew they believed in the plurality of gods, and they knew how to argue for it.

As I said, Mormonism really has changed a lot. And so when I talk about what Mormonism teaches, I'm talking about the orthodox, quote unquote, orthodox Mormonism that is contained in the LDS Scriptures and the King Follett funeral discourse that Joseph Smith delivered, was taught in the LDS temple ceremonies, and was consistently taught through the 1990s.

That's when things started changing. It's not that they have officially changed doctrine, but they have fundamentally changed the emphasis of their doctrine starting around that time period.

The Modern Mormon Church, Continuing Revelation, and Cultural Drift

Would you say, Dr. White, because of cultural trends? Are they trying to adapt? Are they trying to adapt to the culture around them?

Well, everyone's having to deal with that. I've honestly, just in passing, happened with Mormonism was they made the decision to try to mainstream their faith. And so instead of having everybody go to BYU and get their PhDs from BYU, they started sending their people out into Ivy League schools and Princeton and so on and so forth, and then bringing what they've learned back and to teach at BYU and University of Utah and places like that.

What they didn't realize, what they wanted to do was to see how smart our people are, all this stuff too. We're not the backwoods crazy people with 47 wives that you thought we were. What they didn't realize is they were injecting strychnine, cyanide directly into the bloodstream of Mormonism.

Because those people went out, they learned how to analyze things critically. And the fact of the matter is Joseph Smith cannot survive critical examination. The Book of Mormon, which claims to be a historical record of the ancient inhabitants of this hemisphere cannot withstand historical examination.

The Book of Mormon literally claims that the Mesoamericans had horses and chariots and swords and bows and arrows and gold coins and silver coins. None of these things did they have. Jade and cocoa beans was the primary things they traded with.

They did not have swords. They had war clubs. They did not have bows and arrows. They did not ride horses with armor. Joseph had made this all up for what he knew of Rome and things like that, being ignorant of what was actually going on in Mesoamerica.

In the same way, the Doctrine and Covenants has been changed over the years and edited and expanded. And so when you analyze manuscripts and things like that, you discover the Book of Mormon has been edited and changed and the Doctrine and Covenants has been edited and changed.

And we'll look a little bit later if we have time at the Book of Abraham. The point is these people have come back and Mormonism has begun changing as a result. Fundamentally, the Salt Lake City Council is proud that every one of their members is LGBTQ.

The entire city council is LGBTQ. Utah is becoming absolutely blue as far... And you think, well, how can this be? Especially when it comes to issues such as gender and things like that. They have a gendered God.

They believe God is an exalted man. I'll get to that in a second. How could this be? How can these changes be? And the fact is that years and years ago, I wrote something called the 100 Verse Memorization System for Dealing with Mormons.

I wrote this thing probably when you were about three. And so it's old, but it's still very, very useful. And the first section of that 100 Verse Memorization System is how to deal with the subjectivity of the Mormon testimony.

They have a testimony. They've prayed about it. Moroni 10, four and five, pray these things. The Holy Spirit will testify the truth of these things. And that was something you had to deal with. So there was always a level of subjectivity at the very foundation of the Mormon experience.

And even though they would say that they had an objective revelation from God, the fact was that of their four books of scripture, the King James Version of the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, those four books, these correct this, and these can be added to.

Right. And so the idea of an objective truth, an unchanging concept of revelation was never firmly grounded. And in fact, one of their arguments that they thought was the strongest was that they received continuing revelation from God in the general conference.

They didn't canonize it. They still called it continuing revelation. That really led to a lot of confusion on the part of a lot of Mormons when you would press them on the contradictions between scriptural revelation and what they claim is scripture.

They struggled very much with that. And I think that's also part of the reason why there is so much change going on in the emphasis now in Mormonism. So they have the Bible,.

But these other sources can be added to, and they can correct the Bible?

Theologically, but there hasn't been a revelation since June 8th, 1978, technically.

Well, that's what I'm trying to get. So they say they have an objective revelation, but that objective thing over here can be added to and change, which makes it not as objective as one might think it seems.

And the only way to actually interpret it is by the living prophet. Right, which is very subjective. Very, very subjective. Right, okay. So their objective revelation, they play with very subjectively.

Yes, yes, very much so, yeah. All right.

Now you did say something real quick, and I apologize for interjecting here, and I noticed this is kind of common in the cults, where you have Mormonism and Jehovah's Witness, and even Islam, this idea that the true message is lost.

Is that something that is used as a tool so as to open the door for some of these really, really different teachings that these cults bring? Is that, you think that's an intentional point there? Very, very much so.

All the groups need to have a door opener. So Jehovah's Witnesses will use things like the shape of the cross, or the date of Christmas, or birthdays, or things like this as a means of separating you from your religious tradition and getting you to look at your religious tradition critically while accepting their message.

The Mormons are claiming latter-day revelation and a continuing revelation. They believe that their very, very, very, very, very, very elderly prophet is a prophet, that he is an apostle of Jesus Christ.

There are currently 15 living apostles of Jesus Christ on earth. So you have, in Mormonism, you have the prophet and his first and second counselors. So you have what's called the first presidency. They're all prophets, revelators, and seers, and they're apostles.

Then you have the council of the 12 apostles. They are also apostles, just as Paul was, or Peter was, or anybody else. So there's 15 there. Then you have the 70. And this forms the hierarchy of a massive LDS church.

I mean, they have billions and billions. They're very, very wealthy. And so when the prophet dies, then he is replaced. And by the way, I can guarantee you, Joseph Smith did not intend it to work this way.

But Mormonism is stuck with a system now that guarantees them a leader who is always just about to die. They can't have a young leader. It's not possible. Why is that? Because it has to be, there is a seniority, a ranking system, and that means the prophets just keep getting older and older.

I think the current guy is 95. And the guy that I think will replace him is 93. So it's been this way for a long, long time. That's not what Joseph Smith intended.

Now, when they call themselves apostles, would you say that they see these people as apostles with a capital A? Yes. Literally like Paul? Just like Paul?

Like they can write scripture? Yes. Wow, okay. Yes, they don't. That's, see, that's the inconsistency is the original thrust of Mormonism was a living voice of God, a prophet on earth today. We have guidance from God.

The Holy Spirit speaks at every general conference,.

But then there's no revelation. That sounds like papal infallibility.

Yes, yes, exactly. But it is very much that way. They will talk about it being revelation, but then they don't put it into their scriptures. Interesting, okay. So that creates a two-tiered system. And like I said, even when on June 8th, 1978, the Mormon church gave the priesthood to blacks because Brigham Young had taught that the day that the blacks received the priesthood was the day the church went into apostasy.

Brigham Young had taught that the blacks were the offspring of Cain. They had been less valiant in fighting in the heavenly war before we came to earth. And as a result, then they are cursed as far as the priesthood.

So when Stanford started to boycott playing BYU, all of a sudden a revelation was received giving the priesthood to the blacks. But what's interesting is it wasn't put in the Doctrine and Covenants as the next revelation, section 139 or something like that.

It was made a general announcement and put into the Pearl of Great Price. So it wasn't even handled in the same way. And so the church is absolutely terrified of the idea of somebody getting a revelation.

That would upset the status quo. And I think the Mormon church is rife right now for a charismatic leader to come along. I think if a charismatic prophet-like leader came along, could split that church right down the middle even more so.

Because there are a lot of Mormons that I knew back in the 80s and they're sitting here looking at the church today going, what on earth happened? This isn't the Mormon church I grew up with. And so that could really happen.

Now I'm going way, way, way, way too far out into the woods and haven't given you what you really need here. Let me, I'm sorry.

No, I said, okay. So if you wanted to move into something, you wanted to share something on the screen,.

That'd be perfectly fine. Yeah, let me, now this isn't.

I know you're just flexing your technological ability, but that's fine.

The clarity here isn't as good as I would like. It's a PDF that I pulled up. If I did it with this keynote, it would probably, this will need to be good enough. Let me give you the world's fastest run through on LDS theology, okay?

The Eternal Law of Progression and the Mormon View of Reality

Okay. This is called the eternal law of progression. And the diagram I'm gonna show you, I always use this as the illustration. I'm a Trekkie. And so one of the things that Star Trek had to deal with in the original series was, why do all aliens speak English?

Especially when we've met them only for the first time. And so as you know, what they came up with was what's called the universal translator. Which by the way, Google has pretty much already invented, which is an interesting thing to think about.

But the idea was that when the alien comes up on the screen, there's a computer gadget that is translating whatever they're saying into English and vice versa. And that's why you can get around that plot problem in the situation.

So this is my universal translator. This is what I designed to be the universal translator to explain as briefly as possible, the central core of LDS theology, okay? So let's take a look at it. You tell me if you can even really make sense out of it here because I can

Let me see if I can do this. Let's see if I can do, let me see if I could change the screen. And bring it up full screen? Yeah, I'm gonna try to at least make it bigger, maybe something like this, no.

No, it's just It only seems to want to do you. Yeah, that's odd. Okay, so I'll just keep it the way it was. I can see it.

Okay, well, actually here, I can zoom in on stuff like this. There we go. That makes it a lot better. That makes it a lot better, doesn't it? Oh yeah, much better. Okay, all right. So let's look back here for a second.

This is the whole thing. Starting up here with intelligences of matter, spirit children, mortal probation, baptism of the dead, paradise, celestial, so on and so forth. So this is the whole, and what you need to sort of figure is this is supposed to be circular.

So you have spirit children here and you have spirit children here. So this is a cycle and you go through all of this, okay? So let me zoom in on a section of it up here, up at the beginning. These are the two eternal things in Mormonism, intelligences and matter.

Intelligence is a matter. God cannot create matter. There is no creatio ex nihilo. There is no creation by divine fiat. God in Mormonism can only organize pre-existing matter, which means matter is...

What? Now, I apologize for interrupting because I will have questions as you move through it.

Is it okay if I kind of just Which means this is going to be a three hour long program. I want you to understand that right now. Okay, I'll let you finish. Go ahead. I'm just telling you, but if you want to ask I know how this goes.

Go ahead.

Well, you might be able to answer it very simply. You said, so it starts there with the intelligences. Is the Mormon view of reality, that ultimate reality is impersonal or personal? Are these intelligences personal?

The intelligences are personal. What their origin is, is not known. And intelligences would include sort of the basic form of God, men, and angels, because God, men, and angels are all the same order of being in Mormonism.

Gotcha. All right, you can keep going. I'm sorry about that. Okay, no problem. So from the realm of intelligence, this will be a bunch of questions I can't, that I'm not going to address because we just don't have time to, but if you want to address them, ask them.

From there, you go to the realm of spirit children. Now, how you get spirit children, I will have to explain at a later point. You just have to, for the moment, accept the idea that in application to this world, and there are an unlimited number of worlds, according to Mormonism, what you have is a situation where we all existed as spirit beings prior to our birth here on earth.

We were the offspring of a heavenly father and a heavenly mother. They both have bodies of flesh and bones, but no blood. Interesting, okay. But they have offspring that are made of spirit, but spirit is actually material.

It's just more refined, and hence is not visible to physical eyes. I'm just giving you the Mormon explanation here. I can't necessarily take too much time there. So let's go down from there. See, here's the spirit children.

So let's zoom in on the next section, and that is, this is a PDF right here. So here's spirit children. Notice the line goes down to the mortal probation. That's where we are now. Okay. We are in the mortal probation.

We lived as spirit children, and then we were born in the mortal probation. Now, you might ask a quick question. Why don't we remember the spiritual pre-existence? There isn't really a dogmatic answer to that question, but a lot of Mormon women used to theorize that, see, spirit children have what we would call physical bodies.

So you're born as a little spirit baby. You've got spirit diapers. You grow up and you play spirit games, and then you become a six-foot-tall spirit child, and then you're born into the mortal probation, and the idea was the shock of being so big and being compressed down to a baby causes you to lose your memory.

That's how you get here. Now, so this is where we are, and then you'll notice there is a line right here going upwards next to an A and a B that goes to paradise. This is the way Mormons leave mortal probation, and they go up to paradise.

Now, what's the A and the B? Well, the A and the B, I will need to scroll down here. There they are, the A and the B. A is called the four fundamentals of the gospel, the four fundamentals of the gospel in Mormonism, faith, repentance, baptism, and laying on of hands.

So faith and repentance, you'd think that sounds just like what we mean, but once we get through this, you'll realize it's defined very, very differently. Baptism is by immersion, but it has to be performed by someone who minimally holds the Aaronic priesthood, which was restored to Joseph Smith in 1829.

And no one else's baptism is valid. And then laying on of hands to receive the Holy Ghost has to be done by someone holding the Melchizedek priesthood, which Peter James and John gave to Joseph Smith as well.

John the Baptist was the one that restored the Aaronic priesthood for some reason. Those are the four fundamentals. You have to have those to enter into paradise. But then B is continued obedience to gospel rules and principles.

So this is continued faithfulness. It's very much what we would call a work salvation system. But here is, that's how the Mormons get to paradise. But the vast majority of people who die aren't Mormons.

So where do the Mormons go? Well, I'm sorry, where do the non-Mormons go? Well, if you look here, I'm not sure if I zoomed in on this. This chart is super helpful. I think, to be honest with you, I think the PDF is at aomin .org.

I think if you searched for eternal law of progression, a much higher quality version of this pops up, I think. So the vast majority of people go from the mortal probation down here to the spirit prison.

So I remember very, very clearly. Well, I'll tell a story. Everybody who isn't a Mormon when they die goes to the spirit prison. And I see this little line right here. It comes down and it's coming from this line that goes up to paradise.

You gotta give the Mormons one thing. They are missionary minded. Because in Mormonism, Mormons come from paradise down to the spirit prison and proclaim the gospel to the spirits in the spirit prison.

And they tell you how you can get out of the spirit prison. Now, think about it. If you have four fundamentals of the gospel, faith, repentance, baptism, laying out of hands, a spirit can have faith and a spirit can repent, but it's very difficult to baptize a spirit by immersion.

And it's impossible to lay hands on that of the spirit because your hands will just go through. So this line right here is for anyone in the spirit prison who believes can be released from the spirit prison by baptism for the dead.

Now, Dr. White, they don't know who believes in the spirit prison. And so that's why they baptize for the dead like anybody?

Right, right. They baptize for as many people as they possibly can. So they're not saying that by doing that in the place of these individuals, that they are automatically removed from the spirit prison, but they are providing the means that if they believe and repent, and then someone does the baptism for the dead for them, which includes laying out of hands to receive the Holy Ghost, then they can get out via baptism for the dead.

They go up to paradise as well with the rest of the Mormons because they become Mormons after death, basically. But you'll notice that's still a fairly small number of people, there's a larger line that goes from the spirit prison to terrestrial and celestial levels of glory.

So over here, you have the top level of glory, the celestial level. Here you have the terrestrial level and then the telestial level. Now, if you've never heard the term telestial before, it's because Joseph Smith made it up.

He looked at 1 Corinthians chapter 15, and 1 Corinthians chapter 15 says, there is a glory of the sun and the moon and the stars. And that says there's a heavenly glory and there's an earthly glory. And Joseph Smith figured that the translators had gotten something wrong.

And so these are levels of glory. And so the King James had celestial and terrestrial for levels of glory, which essentially means heavenly and earthly. The King James wasn't consistent in how it translated those Greek terms because in the Gospel of John, it said heavenly and earthly.

And so he figured something was missing. So he took the first two letters of terrestrial and slapped them on the last part of celestial and came up with a new word called telestial. Literally, that's how he did it.

That's how Joseph Smith did exegesis. And so this is the glory of the sun. This is the glory of the moon. This is the glory of the stars. Now, see this little light green line right here? It's marked resurrection, resurrection.

So this line crosses that. And that means the people from the spirit prison that do not accept baptism for the dead are resurrected. They receive a body and then they are judged as to whether they'll go into the terrestrial kingdom or the telestial kingdom.

Now, I've been told that I will go to the terrestrial kingdom because I'm a nice guy. The people that go to the telestial kingdom are drug pushers and murderers and glory. In fact, Joseph Smith said that if you saw the glory of the telestial kingdom for even a moment, you'd commit suicide to get there.

So why would I say they're damned? Because all theological words have different meanings in Mormonism. And you're damned up in your progress to become a God. Only those in the celestial kingdom have the opportunity of achieving godhood.

People down here do not. So they're damned. So in essence, their bodies that are resurrected are neutered. They can't have children because one of the powers of godhood is the ability to have offspring, spiritual offspring.