The Changing World of Mormonism, A Few Tweets, 90 Minutes

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. Boy, I tell you, summer's starting. Not bad, I can't complain. We're finally drifting up above 100 degrees, just barely. And of course, here in Phoenix, it's so stinking dry.

You can't really tell yet. Until it hits 110, it really hasn't started. But you can't leave the door open at night now. That's, once that hits, then it's like literally October at the best before you get to have the fresh air coming in again.

But I have to admit, I just, I was, Babylon B is putting a few things out here that distracted me. Report reveals 7 .5 billion in government EV charger spending has purchased one four-pack of Energizer AA's.

That's true, that's true. You want corruption? You wanna see how private industry can do for $10 what the government can do for 1 ,000? These are the most incompetent. It's not they're incompetent. I remember on one of my first trips to Ukraine, we're driving along and I'm just, you're just holding on for dear life.

These roads are horrific. They really are. I mean, I saw some bad roads in Zambia, but you sort of expect that in Zambia. Here we are in Ukraine and I'm going, my goodness, can't they fix these roads?

They say, oh, they've fixed them all the time. The money is legislated and it just never gets to fixing the roads. It goes to all the corruption exists in the way. Well, 7 .5 billion for EV chargers. Well, that ain't gonna happen.

And I can tell you why it's not gonna happen. All this information is out there, but you look at what these pinheads in Brussels or WEF, all these wacko leftist organizations are saying, would require, I saw one recently, just for copper alone.

Now, Arizona, hey, they call us the copper state because I think we produce more copper than any other state does. I could be wrong about that. But we would have to be to meet the 2030 goals that these pinheads are literally putting out there.

We would have to be opening two new copper mines per, I think it's per month, between now and then. Do you have any idea what it takes to open a copper mine? Do you have any idea what it does to the environment?

I got to do this fly over one once, you go, you know, it's gonna be really hard to fill that thing back up again someday. Yeah, you're right. And it's gonna happen, it's not possible. The amount of copper that goes into a regular car versus what goes into an EV, it's massive difference.

Can't be done, it's just not possible. And then I thought, and I could have told you about this. I remember when we went to South, I'll go to South Africa all the time. And I'd notice barbed wire around the bottom of streetlights.

And not stoplights, stoplights. And it's because people will climb up there and they will steal the copper and the metal out of anything in the middle of the night. I mean, if it's not wrapped in barbed wire in South Africa, it will disappear.

And so I saw a picture a few weeks ago of a Tesla EV charging, you know, the line of charging things that they have. And every single cable, as it comes down out of the charger to where it would go down to the thing you plug into your car, was cut off.

They had gone through and they had chopped off every single one of them to get the copper and sell the copper.

And it's like, what are you gonna do?

Put guards on these things? I mean, it's just the insanity of it all. And who's getting rich and who's getting poor? We're getting poor, the Chinese are getting rich. It's like, you all can't see this?

Y 'all can't see you're being taken to the cleaners? Every which way? Anyway, so yes, report reveals 7 .5 billion in government EV charger spending has purchased one pack of Energizer AA's and then airline pilot convicted of hate crime for leaving contrail marks on rainbow.

And that's about, now I didn't get a chance to check this, but I saw something. Again, I'm just saying I saw this, that someone had literally been given 13 years on a felony for doing doughnuts on a pride flag on a street.

Now, I didn't get a chance to check that out. So maybe it's, they caught the, because I've seen the video of a guy in a big dually doing doughnuts on a pride flag on a street. Well, I hate to tell you this, but people have been doing doughnuts all over the place for a long time.

They didn't need pride flags, okay? It's just something people like to do. I understand the temptation, but I'm the one that buys the tires. So I'm just like, yeah, no thanks. But that would not shock me.

It would not shock me that the same people who would let the BLM protesters from 2020 throw explosive devices at federal buildings, and then when they're arrested, not even press charges, that the same people would try to, they're the same people that put January 6th people, that had them locked up in isolation for years now, that they would go after somebody who does doughnuts on a pride flag.

Because, hey, that's the new, you can do anything you want to the American flag, but don't you dare do anything to a pride flag, ooh. Hate to tell you, but June's coming, and I got an email this morning from a company that I do a lot of business with.

Well, not business with, well, anyway. And I wrote back, and I'm like, please, please stop it. So many of the people who subscribed to your service are offended by this. Just please stop it. And of course, it bounced back.

No one really reads anything at this point. Yeah, it doesn't really matter if they did or didn't, I guess, but June is coming, and I don't even know what to say anymore. I'm just really hoping that there seems to be a pushback a little bit.

There are a lot of companies that have lost hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, and I'd like to think that maybe, it's sad when one of the highest motivations you can hope for in a country is greed.

It's higher than the rest of the motivations they seemingly are giving into. So anyway, all right, so let's get into some serious stuff here. I was linked to this. What happened was, Protestia sent this to me.

I'm pretty sure it was Protestia that sent it to me. And right as I got home from the last trip, which was not fun, I saw that night, as I recall, a conflict online regarding some black fellow inviting Glenn Beck to this thing where it's supposed to be a Christian men's thing, and why are you inviting Glenn Beck, he's Mormon, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And this Mormon webcast, and there are more and more of them, I have to wonder what any of them would have been like back in my younger days if there had been such a thing as social media. We started dealing with Mormonism long before Al Gore even got a glimmer of thought of inventing the internet.

And so now they're all over the place. And this particular one includes, not in this one, but appearances by Kwaku L. And some of you may recall the encounters we had, the encounter we had with Kwaku L on Apology Radio a number of years ago.

And I'm gonna tell you something, it's so obvious to me, people like Kwaku would have been excommunicated so fast in the 1980s that their heads would have been spinning. Things have changed so much, I've seen pictures.

Then again, these days, who can trust pictures? Who can trust anything? But years ago, before that was becoming really popular, let's just say that that fellow is not long for Mormonism. We'll just put it that way.

Anyway, this guy named Ward, I think, is the one doing this webcast. And he's talking about religious bigotry. And the religious bigotry is that Protestia is protesting that Glenn Beck is being invited as a Christian to a Christian men's thing.

I sort of doubt this is the first time it's happened. I don't really keep track of Glenn Beck or watch Glenn Beck, listen to Glenn Beck, anything like that. There's just, I don't know how anybody keeps up with almost anything these days.

There's so many webcasts and you're sitting there going, yeah, you're the one to talk about that. Hey, look, we were here before any of the rest of you were. You really were. We can prove it, we've got the archives.

You can go back and look. We were doing webcasting before there was a web to webcast on. So it was because we were poor. And so that's how it works. And so I'm not complaining about it, but there's just so many.

People say, hey, did you hear this? Like last night, someone said, did you hear the conversation on CrossPolitic about the text in Matthew? And the way it was said to me, I was like, it sounds like they're saying a question about the textual validity of something.

And when I listened in, it was actually someone telling the story I've told a bunch of times. They were talking about this anti-Semitism legislation that's popping up all over the place now. And basically asking the question, could it make the New Testament illegal?

And the story, they didn't get it quite right. Well, of course, I suppose I could be wrong, but I don't think so. I've been telling this story for years. The story they were telling was about, if you recall, when the Passion of the Christ movie came out.

I had actually heard about it a little bit before it came out, and I'd actually preached a sermon on a Sunday night at Phoenix Forum Baptist Church about the subject. And there was a little delay in it coming out.

And the reason was that there is this huge controversy about it being anti-Semitic. And the reason was, it quoted from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 27. I think it's verse 25. I don't have it up right now.

Where to Pilate, the Jews cry out, "'His blood be upon us and upon our children.'". And what had happened is there had been such an outcry that this was in the film that what they had to do was they had to pull all that video back, all those massive films that they sent out back then.

I'm not sure how they do it now, but anyways. And if you remember the film, the actors were speaking in foreign languages. They were speaking in Aramaic. And then they had English subtitles. And what they said on CrossPolitik was they took that scene out.

They didn't. All they did was remove the subtitles. So if you know a little bit, I know enough to follow something in Hebrew. Aramaic is very close related. If you know the story, what's being said, you could still hear the actors in Aramaic saying, "'His blood be upon us and upon our children.'".

But they just turned the subtitles off at that point. So you wouldn't see that in English. And so they had been saying that it had been removed. It wasn't, and that was 20 years ago. And of course, I'm really sensitive to that because like I said, I went to Fuller.

And if you went to Fuller even in the 80s, then you are well aware of the whiplash effect that World War II and the Holocaust had on New Testament studies, and that there are just certain things in the New Testament you're just not even allowed to believe anymore.

You just, you can't, that thing that Paul said, you know, no, no, no, you can't really talk about that. You can't go with that. So anyway, I'm not sure how I got onto that. As I started listening to these Mormons, I was just once again struck with how much things have changed.

I think one of the advantages, and believe me, I can talk to you a lot about the disadvantages, but one of the advantages of entering into your older years is you have perspective to be able to look back and go, wow, Mormonism has changed.

And of course, I've been talking about that for a long, long time. I mean, you know, when we first start going out to the Easter pageant, going up to Salt Lake City, you would be hoarse by the end of the night or by the end of the day in Salt Lake City from the constant conversations you'd be having with Mormons.

And now you almost have to offer $20 to talk to me for five minutes. You have to trip people up, do something to get any conversation going at all. They do not want to talk to you. And the knowledge, when you do get a conversation going, is amazingly deficient.

I told the story last year when I was in Mesa having a conversation with a Mormon. He's going, I just don't understand.

Why you all are out here.

No, we're all baptized Christians. We accept your baptism. You accept our baptism.

We can all get along.

And I remember my eyes started getting big. I sort of looked past the guy I was talking to to a Mormon standing behind him. And I could read his face. He's going, oh. He knew they don't accept our baptisms and vice versa.

That other Mormon knew, yeah, that's not really what we believe. But this poor kid had no earthly idea. That's getting to be more and more the case. Though, like I say, you have so many, so rare conversations, it's hard to even know about.

Anyway, so someone put too much caffeine in the coffee at Babylon Bee this morning. They're cranking them out. Actually, this one came out yesterday. Study finds 100 of men cooking on grill just kind of moving meat around and hoping for the best.

I don't even pretend. I do not even pretend. Don't look at me. Anyway, so let me, before I play this, I started thinking back and I started digging through very, very old stuff. I found my old, we called it the Mormon missionary masher.

And all the old photocopies and stuff that we had before the Mormon church admitted that it actually existed. I was carrying around a photocopy of Joseph Smith's 1832 diary where he gives the first account of the first vision and there weren't two beings and completely different and clearly evolutionary and it developed over time.

And back then, the church is like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Now you can go buy nice hard bound LDS volumes with all that stuff in it. That's all changed massively. And so I was digging through it because I know I have, over the years, because I started teaching a class of Mormonism at the North Phoenix Baptist Church.

And then at some point I turned that class over to Mike Beliveau and I started teaching a Christian doctrines class. And it was the Christian doctrines class, I think, where we first met a number of years later.

But you also took the Mormonism class with Mike and then didn't you start team teaching it? You took it over. That's what I thought you eventually did. And thinking back, that was dangerous. But anyway, go for it, buddy.

So I knew that over all those years that there was a section in the class where we had gone over some of the stuff that Mormon leaders have said about Christianity because Mormonism teaches that the LDS church is the only true church on earth.

Book of Mormon says there are saved two churches, church of the lamb, the church of the devil. And they claim that without the priesthood authority, you cannot baptize, you cannot preach any message with authority without the priesthood authority.

They are the only true church on earth. And when we would have conversations with Mormons, that was a given. You didn't have to convince them of that. They already knew it. They heard that regularly from the pulpit.

They heard that regularly in the general conference, et cetera, et cetera. Well, that's not the case anymore. I remember, man, I wish I could remember that guy's name. There was an older Mormon guy. The names in the back of my mind.

They would come out to Mesa once in a while. And he was this, can't we all just get along, ecumenical, let's have dinner together type guy, older fellow. And I may have actually gotten together with him for lunch once or something, because that's what he was always begging you to do.

Yeah, even Rich is trying to remember it. And, but what made it weird was that that was very unusual. That's not yet what you were hearing. Now that's what you're hearing all the time. That's what you're hearing even from the missionaries.

When I first started dealing with Mormonism, when they would come to your door, what they wanted to do is they wanted to present to you Joseph Smith's first vision story. And that first vision story includes within, and they included this part, that, well, I might have it.

Yeah, okay, here. Let me just read it to you. My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. I asked the personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right, which I should join.

And I was answered, I must join none of them, for they're all wrong. And the personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight, and those professors were all corrupt.

That's LDS scripture. That's LDS scripture. That's the current version of the first vision. That's not what was in the original versions of the first vision. The first vision's developed over time as Joseph Smith's theology developed as well.

But that's what they wanted to talk to you about when they got into the house, was just how far off everybody else is. And here's the one true church. And man, they were growing like gangbusters. I've said before, in the mid-'80s, when the Godmakers film came out, an average Southern Baptist church had 274 members.

In an average week, 273 Southern Baptists became Mormons. That was one church, one average-sized church wholesale, each week, converted to Mormonism. 52 churches in a year. And that's when they were being bold and saying, we're the one true church.

And then stuff started changing. And that change has continued and accelerated right through to our day. Mormonism is changing, big time, no question about it, in many, many different ways. But way too easy to continue wandering around here.

A part of the LDS Temple Ceremony representing the Celestial Kingdom. I grabbed this out of my notebook from years and years and years ago. I probably made this photocopy in 1983, probably, 84 maybe, 40 years ago.

The amazing thing is, the best collection of these citations I found was from an old, old friend, long gone now, the last man to die in the Los Angeles riots. And so much of the boldness that we have had over the years in witnessing the Mormons came from this guy.

His name was Wally Tope, Wally Tope, T-O-P-E. On the front lines, witnessing the Mormons, Wally Tope. And he had a little tract called, Who's Persecuting Who? And so I had all this stuff in other forms, but this is the nice, easiest to read version.

So in the LDS Temple Ceremony, representing the Celestial Kingdom, or the world we now live in. And I don't know, I've lost track of how many changes have taken place since this time in the LDS Temple Ceremony.

This was once in it, and as I argued in the book, Is the Mormon My Brother? Mormonism, at one point anyways, represented the Temple Ceremonies as a part of Revelation. Divinely revealed by God. They may have removed this by now, I don't know.

Lucifer is on screen. And remember, in the original temples, these were all acted out by actors. Now they're all on video. Well, except for Salt Lake, which has been closed for a long time now. Because it almost fell down in that earthquake.

And they're rebuilding it from underneath the ground up. So I don't think it's open yet, but I assume that when it does reopen, they will go back to having actual actors do all this stuff. So how would you like to be the temple-worthy Mormon guy that has to play Lucifer?

How do you get picked for that one? That's what I wanna know. What did you do to get picked for that one? Who did you really get angry with you to do that? Lucifer, oh, I see you want religion. You want someone to preach to you.

I'll have some preachers here presently. And the preacher shows up. My, a fine congregation. Lucifer, oh, are you a preacher? The preacher says, yes. Lucifer, have you been to college and received training for the ministry?

Why, certainly a man cannot preach unless he has been trained for the ministry. Lucifer, well, do you preach Orthodox religion? Yes, that is what I preach. Well, if you, Lucifer, well, if you preach your Orthodox religion to this people and convert them, I will pay you well.

The preacher says, I will do my best. Good morning, sir. So the average, the Christian preacher is pictured as the hireling of Lucifer, the hireling of Satan. And this same doctrine, this same, I'm sorry, this same ceremony attacks the doctrine of God.

Quote, so great he fills the universe and yet so small he can dwell in your heart. Even though Alma 34, 36 said that, but Joseph Smith did not believe when he wrote the Book of Mormon what he believed when the temple ceremonies were developing and things like that.

Then we have this guy. When, again, when I started dealing with Mormonism, this is actually yours. I don't know where mine went. The paperback that I had initially, I have a hardback in the other room, but that's sort of hard to hold up.

I think mine's at home. Talk about having easy access. Can you imagine if Paul wrote Christian doctrine? What use that would be? If John wrote Christian doctrine? In the 1980s, when I was talking to Mormons, they believed that this man, Bruce R. McConkie, was an apostle of Jesus Christ with the same level of authority as Paul or Peter or John or any of the others.

And I can guarantee you one thing, that's what Bruce R. McConkie believed too. Bruce R. McConkie believed he was an apostle of Jesus Christ. Bruce R. McConkie believed he had authority to teach as an apostle as well.

Now we know, we know there were some interesting conversations that took place amongst the Council of Twelve and the First Presidency. And what's fascinating to me is this book is no longer in print. You can't get it.

I know when we would go up to Salt Lake City, we'd go to that big old LDS bookstore up there and multiple levels and this book was everywhere. Now it's nowhere. And shortly after McConkie died, I ran into my first missionaries who were like, well, you know, that was just his opinion.

And I think, you know, I listen to missionaries today. They don't know one one thousandth of what's in this book. They don't, they don't. This wasn't the first book I read. I think this one was. This was the one I read.

So there's lots of, oh, the Mormons and the Jewish people. I don't know, that's one of their publications. But markings all through LeGrand Richards, A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, which Wally Taube said it's a marvel, more don't wonder.

And the reason I'm holding this in my hand, there was a set of, there was a set of books, Articles of Faith by James Talmadge, This, Doctrine of Salvation by Joseph Ewing Smith. These would be the books that would be given to missionaries in preparation for their mission trips.

And so you could normally assume at least a basic level of knowledge, not all. I talked to some missionaries that just didn't read anything or listen much either. But this was one, and the reason I'm holding it is less than five days ago, there is this guy that pops up in my feed on Twitter every once in a while, Harfak Yad or something like that, who's a Mormon.

And he was doing the new Sola Scriptura Mormon thing. Now, again, I've stood outside the general conference in Salt Lake City years and years and years and years, 18 years ago, and heard Mormons saying over and over again, one of the things I love about the church, we receive Latter-day Revelation.

There's Latter-day Revelation going on right now inside that building, and you don't have that. We have apostles and prophets, you don't have that. We're receiving a word from the Lord this very day, going on right in there.

So here's this guy going, Mormon theology is only found in the standard works of the church. And I thought back to this book, and I didn't bother to look for it because it's just all over the place. But pretty much, yeah, okay, page 23.

Yeah, okay, page 15. I knew I would mark all of them. Um, it must be remembered, however, that this knowledge, this is of the Father and the Son, this knowledge was not obtained by the prophet through a study of the Bible.

The true knowledge of God and his Son, Jesus Christ, has come to the world in this dispensation, not through a study of the Bible, but through the actual appearance, these heavenly personages through the young Joseph Smith, as he so eloquently testified, and over and over and over again, you will have here in the works of LeGrand Richards, again, an apostle.

I remember buying this book at the old LDS bookstore that used to be on Northern Avenue, around 35th, over and over and over again, an apostle of the LDS church. Joseph Smith did not get this from studying the Bible.

He didn't get it from scripture. It was a divine revelation. Now, it's all what we've got. Back to Bruce R. McConkie, good old Bruce here. I passed, I gave a track on blood atonement. I found really ironic Bruce R. McConkie ones, as he was walking into general conference.

Hence, true and acceptable Christianity is found among the saints who have the fullness of the gospel, and a perverted Christianity holds sway among the so-called Christians of apostate Christendom. In these circles, it is believed and taught that Christianity has its beginning in the mortal ministry of our Lord.

Actually, of course, Adam was the first Christian. Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, page 132, I'm sure, referenced that. The titles, Church of the Devil, and Great and Abominable Church, are used to identify all churches, which are designed to take men on a course that leads away from God and his laws, and thus from salvation.

There is no salvation outside this one true church. There is no salvation outside the church, Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints. Doctrines of Salvation, I didn't bring my three-volume set from Joseph Fielding Smith in, but Doctrines of Salvation, volume two, and Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, pages 137, 138, and 670.

Christians speak often of the blood of Christ and its cleansing power. Much is believed and taught on this subject, however, is such utter nonsense, and so probably false, that to believe it is to lose one's salvation.

What the Mormons Think of Christ, LDS pamphlet, page 31. We talk about Christianity, but it is a perfect pack of nonsense. It is a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. It is as corrupt as hell, and the devil could not invent a better engine to spread his work than the Christianity of the 19th century.

John Taylor, Journal Discourses, 167. They wish to put the cup to your lips and pour the strong drink down your throats, caring only for what is in your pockets. They remind me of a Methodist priest in Iowa, after a good collection, the money was on the table, and he wished the people to sing, and so he struck up, this is the God we adore.

Brigham Young, Journal Discourses, 8, 132. But who in this generation have authority to baptize? None but those who have received authority in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All of the churches are entirely destitute of all authority from God, and any person who receives baptism with the Lord's Supper from their hands will highly offend God, for he looks upon them as the most corrupt of all people.

Both Catholics and Protestants are nothing less than the whore of Babylon, whom the Lord denounces by the mouth of John the Revelator as having corrupted all the earth by their fornications and wickedness, and any person who should be so wicked as to receive a holy ordinance of the gospel from the ministers of any of these apostate churches will be sent down to hell with them unless they repent of the unholy and impious act.

That, of course, is Orson Pratt from The Seer, and there are people who didn't like that book. But again, he was the leader of the LDS Church in the early days. "'The Christian world,' Brigham Young said, "'I discovered was like the captain and crew "'of a vessel on the ocean without a compass, "'and tossed to and fro with or soever "'the wind listed below them.

"'When the light came to me, "'I saw that all the so-called Christian world "'was groveling in darkness.'". Journal Discourses 573. "'Brother Taylor has just said "'that the religions of the day were hatched in hell.

"'The eggs were laid in hell, "'hatched on its borders, and then kicked onto the earth.'". Brigham Young, Journal Discourses 6176. "'The Christian world so-called are heathens "'as to their knowledge of the salvation of God.'".

Brigham Young, Journal Discourses 8171. "'Heber C. Kimball was beset "'by a number of Baptist priests.'". I always love how little people know about Baptists. "'A Baptist priest who had been attending a conference, "'he read them all down out of the New Testament.

"'With regard to true theology, "'a more ignorant people never lived "'than the present so-called Christian world.'". Brigham Young, Journal Discourses 8199. "'What, are Christians ignorant? "'Yes, as ignorant of things of God as the brute beast.'".

John Taylor, Journal Discourses 625. One more. "'And Christianity at the present time "'is no more enlightened than other systems have been. "'What does the Christian world know about God? "'Nothing. "'Why, so far as things of God are concerned, "'they are the various fools.

"'They know neither God nor the things of God.'". John Taylor, Journal Discourses 13225. There's so much more, obviously, that could be said. The point is that Mormonism teaches that it's the only true church, that it's the only church with authority, that there is a great apostasy, that all the churches are apostate, and that God the Father and Jesus Christ in separate, distinct, personal, physical bodies appeared to Joseph Smith in the spring of 1820, which didn't happen historically, but that's the official story, and told Joseph Smith he was not to join the Baptists or the Methodists, the Presbyterians, because all their professors would corrupt their creeds and abomination.

So we don't have authority, and we're not the true church. The Church of Babylon, Mystery Religion, all the rest of that kind of fun stuff. So this is the teachings of the LDS Church in the past. Now, has anybody come along and said, all that's wrong?

No.

But are you hearing that in the general conference anymore? No, not really. And so freedom has been opened up for this new kind of Mormonism. And so that's why we now have this clip that I'm gonna play for you.

What I'm gonna do is they did the, take the juiciest parts of the whole program, put them together at the beginning, and then I'll grab people, and then they'll listen to the rest of the program thing.

I'm just gonna let the juicy parts speak for themselves. We're not gonna have to worry with all the rest of it. Um, so let's, no, no, no, don't do that. Oh, there we go. I wanted to get it to where we could actually get it full screen.

And so let's listen to what is said here.

Religious bigotry is alive and well in the United States of America, and the way mainline Protestant Christians speak about Mormons is an absolute evidence of this. I really think there just needs to be a protocol in which we engage with this type of so-called Christian where we no longer just tuck our tails in between our legs and walk away and say, oh, they won't invite us to the party.

But we challenge the Christians and say, no, you are not a Christian. And the reason why you're not a Christian right now is because you are not doctrinally omitting us over any good reason from the body of Christ.

You're not defending any scripture. You're not defending Jesus Christ himself, and your arguments have nothing to do with Jesus, but all with the man-made creeds. This is gonna be the best

Okay, so are there lots and lots of evangelicals who have not done their homework about Mormonism?

Yeah.

Is there material out there that is less than super helpful on Mormonism?

Yeah.

Are there people who exclude Mormonism just simply because they've heard that's what they're supposed to do and they don't really know much about themselves?

Yeah.

But the real reason, the real reason that the Christian church unanimously, at least up until really only a few decades ago, would not engage in any kind of ecumenical cooperation with Mormonism was because of Mormonism's own teaching.

Let me say something bold here. It's something I've said many times before. I have read thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of LDS material, and I'm not talking about books about Mormonism.

I'm talking about works from the general authorities of Mormon church. I've written two books on Mormonism. I've done numerous debates against Mormons. I have spoken to over 5 ,000 LDS missionaries personally.

And I'm not talking about 10 seconds as they walk by and won't take a track. I mean witnessing situations. And I have been on radio in Salt Lake City with Martin Tanner as the host of the program, two BYU professors on the other side of the table, call-ins from all Mormons.

I've walked in the lion's den more than once and have been complimented numerous times by Mormons for the accuracy of the focus that we've had upon what really matters in regards to the doctrine of God and salvation, who Christ is, what he's done, what salvation is.

And my book is more of my brother. I never had anyone produce any kind of reputation of it and say, oh, no, no, you're all wrong because I so carefully documented authority claims and what the sources were, and I came up with different levels of authority.

Again, all backed up from fair citations of LDS authority. And I know because Latter-day Revelation, LDS authorities today can be different than LDS authorities were 40 years ago, which is a problem if you're actually claiming to represent an unchanging truth.

But with all of that said, it is my conclusion, and this is someone who has studied Mormonism in depth and studied Islam in depth, that Islam is closer to biblical Christianity than Mormonism ever could be.

And what happens when I say something like that is that people go, but, but, but, but, but, it's the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That's absurd. No, it's not absurd. It's not absurd. In fact, what this gentleman just said is completely missing it.

He says it's all based on creeds. No, it's all based on Bible. It's all based on Bible. In fact, let me give you a verse that hopefully you can take with you. And again, this is in, I know it's back there somewhere.

There it is. Is it more of my brother? I think you can still buy it. I think Solid Ground still has it. I spent a lot of time making sure this was extremely accurate. There's a whole discussion in here on this passage as well, if you want to look it up.

But Jeremiah chapter 10, Jeremiah chapter 10, and how far do I want to go back here? If I'm going to put it on the screen, I'm going to have to blow this up big time and close this side and maximize and blow it up some more.

Okay, that should be enough. Let's start here. Jeremiah chapter 10, verse seven. Who would not fear you, O king of the nations? Indeed, it is your due. For among all the wise men of the nations and all their kingdoms, there is none like you.

But they're all together stupid and foolish in their discipline and delusion. Discipline of delusion. Their idol is wood. Beaten silver is brought from Tarshish and gold from Uphaz. The work of a craftsman of the hands of a goldsmith.

Violet and purple are their clothing. They're all the work of skilled men. But Yahweh is the true Elohim. Yahweh Elohim Emeth. Yahweh is the true Elohim. Now, just real quickly, in LDS theology, that's not true.