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So, for those of you who have survived this long, thank you very much. We now completely change gears once again, and this is going to be a little bit faster than I like to do it, to be perfectly honest with you.
Last time I did this was for a Ratio Christi group in Pachasum, South Africa, a few weeks ago, and I told everybody beforehand, I said, hey, if we're going to do something on Mormonism, invite the Mormon missionaries to come, contact the local mission and tell them you're going to have something on Mormonism.
They will send people. They did. They sent four missionaries. And so we had four missionaries that we got to sit there and do this presentation for. And they stuck around afterwards, talked to people, it was great.
And so, this is a subject that I have been dealing with for many, many, many, many, many years. Everybody figured my first book would be on Mormonism because that was the first group that I really dealt with in depth, starting six months after my marriage.
So it's been three and a half decades now. And it wasn't the first book, but I have written two books on Mormonism, Letters to a Mormon Elder and Is the Mormon My Brother? I'm going to be talking about Orthodox Mormonism today.
Mormonism is changing. Its theology has not yet changed, but the emphasis is changing. And certainly, the knowledge of the average Mormon person to whom you're speaking has radically changed, radically changed.
Things that I used to carry around a huge notebook to document to Mormons today are now being published by the LDS Church. You encounter more and more Mormons today that will admit that Joseph Smith not only had as many as, you know, married to 48 women and had a seer stone, I mean, man, for years we were telling people about how the earliest stories, the translation of the Book of Mormon was Joseph Smith put a seer stone into a hat and covered his face with it and so on.
So we're like, ah, I can't believe that. He had the Urim and Thummim. Last year, the church published a picture of the seer stone they've had all along in their archives. I mean, it has changed a lot since the early 1980s when I started studying this faith.
And the problem is there are so many topics on Mormonism. So, when I compare Mormonism to Jehovah's Witnesses, dealing with Mormonism is this broad, broad, broad spectrum of topics, but you only have to know them this deeply.
Dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses is this narrow range of subjects, and you have to know it really deeply. So they're sort of the opposite of each other in that way. But what can be so confusing about Mormonism, when I first started saying, I had no one to guide me.
And so, I'm reading all these books, and first I'm reading Christian books, and I start realizing what I need to do is read Mormon books to know what Mormons actually believe. For a while, I was like, I'll just never remember all this.
I'll just never be able to put all this together. But it helped to start talking with Mormons and start figuring out what the real central issues were. So, if any of you, any Star Trek geeks in here? All right, good.
All right. I watched, some of you are young, I watched the original when it was first airing, okay? On a barely colored television. And that was back, I remember Gilligan's Island the first year when it was black and white.
Yeah. So anyways, he's really old, he's done pretty well today for being so old. And I hope that his, I hope his denture cream holds, because it'd be really gross if his dentures fell out while he was talking.
So anyway, if you've ever watched Star Trek, one of the big problems is, why is it whenever you run into aliens, they speak English? You know, that's, gotta admit, that's a little bit of a problem. And so, they got around that with something called the Universal Translator.
And the idea is, built into the viewing screen, you have this Universal Translator that somehow allows the, yeah, allows you to communicate. It's sort of like Google Translate on steroids or something like that up in space.
And so, I call the graphic I'm gonna show you a little bit later on, the Universal Translator between Christianese and Mormonese. Because what normally happens when you witness to Mormons is, you think you're getting someplace and you think you've got a fair amount in common, and then about an hour into the conversation, they hang a left and leave you standing there completely alone, wondering what in the world happened.
And the reality is, you guys have been saying completely different things all along, you just didn't know it. You're using the same words, but you're using a different dictionary. And so, if you can know ahead of time what the Mormons actually believe, then you can do the translation and not waste an hour.
And it also helps you to centralize, know what the center core of Mormon theology is, and also to prioritize, because the fact of the matter is, you can spend a lot of time looking at a lot of different subjects that won't get you anywhere.
If you find yourself arguing polygamy with Mormons about Joseph Smith, you're probably wasting your time, you're not gonna get anywhere. You have to have goals, and you need to stick with the important stuff.
So let's start with the important stuff. In 1992, which was not all that long ago, at least for people like me, the church published a book called Achieving a Celestial Marriage Student Manual. So if you want to get married in the temple, not one of these, you know, ward chapels or stake centers you might have around here, but an actual temple.
Is there a temple in South Dakota now? I'm sorry? Omaha? Okay, Omaha has one now. They went on a huge temple building binge starting in the late 90s, and for a long time, Mormons would have to travel a long, long way to get to these big, major temples.
Like if you lived in northern Mexico, you had to go to Mesa, Arizona to go to the Mormon temple. So they went on this big temple building binge, smaller temples, but temple building binge. And if you want to be married in the temple, sealed for time and eternity, in what's called celestial marriage, then you have to do it in a temple.
You can't do that in a ward chapel or anything else like that. And so before you do that, you've got to go through classes. And so this was the manual that you and your wife would have to study before you get married in the temple, between 1992 and 2001.
So for about nine years, this was the manual that was used in all of those classes. So this is copyright, Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So this is the presidency.
These are the leaders of the LDS Church, writing to Mormons. This is Mormons writing, these are the Mormon leaders writing to the Mormon people. You can't get much more official than this, all right? Now on pages four through five, this isn't buried in an appendix someplace.
This is the start. This is the foundation. God was once a man who, by obedience, advanced to his present state of perfection. Through obedience and celestial marriage, we may progress to the point where we become like God.
So immediately you have, God was once a man who, by obedience, advanced to his present state of perfection. That's the first statement. Proclaiming the divine potential within man, John Taylor once wrote, Knowest thou not that thou art a spark of deity, struck from the fire of his eternal blaze and brought forth in the midst of everlasting burnings?
Elder B .H. Roberts stated, Man has descended from God. In fact, he is the same race as the gods. His descent has not been from a lower form of life, but from the highest form of life. In other words, man is, in the most literal sense, a child of God.
This is not only true of the spirit of man, but of his body also. Can you see the implications of these two statements as they relate to you and to your eternal destiny? Elder James E. Talmadge did. He declared, In his mortal condition, man is God in embryo.
However, any individual, now a mortal being, may attain the rank and sanctity of Godship. How is this possible? What course of action will bring this potential to fruition? As you study this lesson, look for the answers to these questions.
Now realize, this is laying the theological foundation for marriage in the Mormon thought. Okay? So you're talking about who man is, who God is. And man is of the same species as God, is what you're being told.
Points to ponder. God became God by obedience to law. God became God by obedience to law. It was late afternoon as we sat in my office, but I felt the time had been well spent. He sat silently now, obviously contemplating the ramifications of the things we had been discussing.
We had talked of God, of how he had become God, and of what that meant in terms of our own exaltation. Finally, he spoke. So now we're going to have a conversation between a younger Mormon and an older Mormon.
And the younger Mormon I've put into yellow italics, and the older Mormon is in plain script. What is this law of exaltation of which you keep speaking? Well, it involves the whole of the gospel law. Everything required of us by God is associated with this law, but the major crowning point of the law which man must obey is eternal marriage.
Therein lies the keys of eternal life, or as the Doctrine and Covenants puts it, eternal lives. And there's the first place I just stopped to go, this is why we need to recognize the language barrier.
You and I have one conception of what eternal life means. When the Mormon hears you say eternal life, they translate it in their minds to eternal lives, and that is the result of a man being sealed to his wives for time and eternity so that after death and resurrection you can have spirit children and repopulate a planet.
That's not what we think about when we think of eternal life. But that's what the Mormon thinks about. In other words, an eternal increase of posterity. And you thought that you were an empty nester. Then what you're saying is that God became God by obedience to the gospel program which culminates in eternal marriage.
Gospel program is a law program that culminates in eternal marriage. Through obedience to law, we can become like our Father in heaven. Yes, do you realize the implications of this doctrine as far as you are concerned?
I think so. If God became God by obedience to all the gospel law, with the crowning point being the celestial law of marriage, then that's the only way I can become a God. Right. And it is the law that assists us in reaching that potential.
It tells us what we must do to gain the ultimate freedom. In fact, it is by obedience to law that we have progressed to our present position. You mean we have always been governed by law? Listen to this next short paragraph.
I think it's one of the most important in all of the thousands of pages of LDS literature I've ever read. Always. You are an eternal being. You were never created. And you cannot be destroyed. But you can advance, progress, and develop by obedience.
That is one of the most fundamental denials the Christian understanding of God and man have ever read. Let me tell you something now, and I will confirm it through the rest of this presentation. Islam is considerably closer to Christianity than Mormonism ever could be.
Islam is monotheistic. So are we. Mormonism is the most polytheistic religion man has ever imagined because Mormonism believes there is an infinite number of gods. And there you have it. You are an eternal being.
You were never created. You cannot be destroyed. But you can advance, progress, and develop by obedience. Then Hamlet's question, to be or not to be, is not the question. I don't know where that came from, but obviously whoever wrote this was a frustrated English student from BYU.
Right. Not in the ultimate sense, at least. Order means law, and that law is the law of the celestial kingdom. Any who come under this kingdom must obey that law. But I thought godhood meant freedom. If I have to do things to become God, am I really free?
You've got it wrong. It was the Savior who said, if you continue in my word, that is obey the law. There's good exegesis for you. You shall know the truth, and truth shall make you free. So by obedience to law, we learn truths by which to become free, but not free from the law.
Can you see that? I think so. I can only be a god if I act like God. Exactly right. Can you imagine, listen to this, this is Mormons talking to Mormons. Can you imagine the state of the universe if imperfect gods were allowed to spawn their imperfections throughout space?
If beings who did not have law under their subjection were free to create worlds? You're not reading science fiction here, folks. This is LDS theology. I guess that would be pretty disastrous, but I'm not sure I see why celestial marriage becomes the crowning apex of this progression.
Marriage doesn't seem directly related to the creation of the, what? Universes. Plural. They don't believe in one universe. There are an unlimited number of universes. That's how you can have an unlimited number of gods.
Oh, but don't be limited by your mortal perspective. God himself has declared his own reasons for existing. Remember he said, for this is my work and my glory. I see his purpose is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, Moses 139.
LDS scripture actually says God's reason for existing is man. That makes sense because God is an exalted man. Mormonism is the most man-centered religion ever designed. There is no true God in it. There is no true God.
If the God of this, the God of this planet was once a man who lived on a planet just like you and I. Fallen state just like you, redeemed center like you and I. Which involves giving birth to spirit children and setting them on the road to exaltation.
If that is to be done, you must have an exalted man and an exalted woman. An exalted man and woman who have been joined together in an eternal marriage. If this man and woman were obedient to all gospel laws except celestial marriage, what would be the result?
They still could not be gods. Now I understand celestial marriage is the crowning ordinance of the gospel. Right, I said with a smile. With that comment, I think we can end the discussion. Mormon leadership talking to the Mormon people.
Right before his death, if Joseph Smith had not been murdered in June of 1844, there would be no Mormonism today. If he had been allowed to live another two years, there would be no Mormonism today. His beliefs were changing so fast that no one could ever make heads or tails out of what he's supposed to be saying.
But because he was murdered improperly in the Carthage jail in June of 1844, you have no Mormonism today, because martyrs produce religions. And a month before his death, he preached a funeral sermon for King Fallen.
He had been crushed in a, he was digging a well and a tub of rock fell on him and crushed him. And here's some of the things that Joseph Smith said. In order to understand the subject of the dead, for the consolation of those who mourn for the loss of their friends, it is necessary we should understand the character and being of God and how he came to be so.
For I'm going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea and take away the veil so that you may see. You need to understand, as long as Mormonism continues to follow Joseph Smith, Mormonism can never be considered a Christian religion because of that statement.
We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. Yeah, that's what God said in Psalm 90 verse 2. Before the mountains were brought forth, wherever thou hast formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
I will refute that idea and take away the veil so that you may see. These are incomprehensible ideas to some, but they are simple. It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another, and that he was once a man like us.
Yea, that God himself, the father of us all, dwelt on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did, and I will show it from the Bible. Here then is eternal life, to know the only wise and true God, and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God the same as all gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one, from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.
These are quotations from the King Follett funeral discourse. This is not LDS scripture. However, I have found that the King Follett funeral discourse has been cited more often by the leaders of the Mormon church than any other thing Joseph Smith ever said.
And that makes it as nigh unto official LDS doctrine as you could possibly have anything. Now here is what I call the universal translator. This is not an Amway presentation. You are not going to be asked to sign up to sell any soap afterwards.
It does look a little bit like it, I realize that, and Amway products are just fine by the way. I am not making fun of anybody. Just been there, done that, got the LOC. So anyhow, here is the universal translator.
This sort of ties together the central aspects of the Mormon faith. And by the way, as tired as I am, I am sure at some point I am going to say the Muslim faith because Mormon and Muslim sound really a lot alike.
So just forgive me. I am only talking about Mormonism from now on, and if I say anything else, just ignore it. So it starts up here in the corner, and so I will zoom into here. Here are the two eternal things in Mormonism, intelligences and matter.
Intelligences and matter. So what you have here is, now some Mormons are not so sure about the intelligences part, but many of them have specifically presented this in the past, that we all existed as intelligences.
God existed as an intelligence. All angels existed as intelligences. We were all the same type of thing. It's basically what makes you, you. The core essence of your personality has eternally existed.
Where it came from, we don't know. There are severe philosophical problems in Mormonism. And matter is eternal. In Mormonism, God cannot create matter. There is no such thing as kerosene, oxen, and helo.
God cannot create matter. He cannot say, let there be. God can only organize pre-existing matter. He cannot bring matter into existence. It is eternal. Now out of that realm comes spirit children. You are going to have to sort of hold on because when you look back at the big one here, here is spirit children up here, here is spirit children down there.
They are the same thing. It's sort of a cycle and it will take a little while to figure out how we get to spirit children. But the reality is in Mormonism, before anyone has a physical existence, because our existence here on this planet, there are billions of other planets in the universes with physical mortal beings like you and I.
And the same process is being gone through on each one of them. And everyone who has a physical existence on those planets, what's called the mortal probation, before that had a spiritual birth, were born to celestial parents, a man with a body of flesh and bone, no blood, and one of his many wives.
And the man and the wife have carnal knowledge of each other, but for some reason, even though she has a nine-month pregnancy, she gives birth to a spirit child, even though she has a body of flesh and bone.
I don't know how that works either, but anyway. And so, you're born as a spirit baby, you have spirit diapers, you have spirit doo-doo, you drink spirit milk, you grow, you have spirit fingernails and spirit hair, and it's an entire parallel, because spirit is just refined matter in Mormon understanding.
And so, you grow as a spirit child, and you go to spirit school, and you play spirit sports, and the whole nine yards in a spiritual pre-existence, okay? So, that's where the spirit children are. We'll talk a little bit more about that later on.
So, from the spirit children realm, there is a line that goes over here, we'll talk about that later on, if we have time. From the spirit realm, we enter into mortal probation, that's where we are right now, our life right now.
From our life right now, there's two ways of getting out. This arrow here, which goes up to paradise, or this arrow here that goes down to spirit prison. This is the Mormon way, and the Mormon way is marked by an A and a B, and hence you have right here, the A and the B defined as A is what's called the four fundamentals of the gospel, the four fundamentals of the gospel, faith, repentance, baptism, and laying on of hands.
Those are the four fundamentals of the gospel. In other words, those are the four absolutely minimal things that have to take place for you to enter into paradise. But they're not enough, but they're the minimum.
There needs to be more beyond that for different levels of glory and things like that, but those are the minimum. Then the B is continued obedience to gospel rules and principles, which we would call works righteousness.
This is the mark of when the Mormon dies, they have had faith, they've repented, they've been baptized by the proper priesthood authority, they've had hands laid upon the head for the receipt of the Holy Ghost by proper priesthood authority, and so they go to paradise.
But the vast majority of human beings, because there's only about 15 million Mormons in the world, and even the Mormons will admit that a majority of their people are not actively involved in the temple and things like that, that the vast majority of the human family leaves the moral probation and goes to the spirit prison.
And in this, now you've got to give the Mormons their props. They are a missionary people. If you've ever gone to one of their temples, you'll find an older couple giving the tour. And many of those older couples served missions when they were kids, and now that they're retired or something, they're doing another mission for the church.
And in Mormonism, you don't stop doing missions even when you die. Because what happens is Mormons from up here in paradise come down to the spirit prison, that's not this line here, that's apostate Mormons, but real Mormons from up here come down to the spirit prison, they preach the gospel to the spirits who are in prison.
So if you're a spirit who is in prison, and you hear the gospel in prison, and you go, I like that. As a spirit, you can have faith. As a spirit, you can repent. But it's very difficult to baptize a spirit by immersion.
And it's impossible to lay hands upon the head of a spirit that just goes through like Casper, you know, it just doesn't work well. And so how then can you get from the spirit prison up to paradise? Well, baptism for the dead.
If you sit outside of, I guess, we were told the Omaha Temple, it's the closest one you can get to. If you're to sit outside the Omaha Temple during the weekdays, and sort of watch with binoculars, you'll eventually be arrested by the police.
But before the police come, you will be able to see people walking in, and they'll have these little bags with them. And they are their temple garments. And they are going in to do ordinances for the dead.
If you use MyFamily .com, Genealogy .com, Ancestry .com, all of them, they're all Mormon. The Mormons own everybody's ancestry databases. They bought them a long, long time ago. There's nothing you can do about it.
If you want to do any genealogical research, the Mormons have got you. And the reason is that they believe that it's their responsibility to study their ancestry and to provide for their ancestors who are in the spirit prison a means of getting out and getting to celestial glory.
The old teaching under Joseph Smith was that you could get no farther than your ancestors did. Like a train. They've had to drop that because the reality is you can only go back so far no matter how good you are.
And so that really isn't an emphasis. But the emphasis is still upon the idea of saving the dead. And so the living do ordinances for the dead. And so they're going in, and they will be baptized for the dead.
Let me look real quick here, just a second, and see where I have this. Oh, did I take it out? Oh, wait a minute. I skipped it. Don't skip slide. There we go. All right. Here we go. Now, years and years ago when I first started studying Mormonism, someone who had come to understand that Mormonism was not true had taken back when we first developed those little microcassette recorders.
They had taken that, and they would strap it to the leg and had gone through the temple ceremonies with that hidden multiple times because the tape would only last so long. And had finally had recorded all the temple ceremonies.
So I remember listening to them for the first time. Well, since then, now you've got little spy cams. And so since then, they have now been videotaped. And you can actually go on YouTube and watch the temple ceremonies online.
But this baptism of the dead is fascinating. Up until the Atlanta Temple, in every temple that had been built, the baptismal font was always underground. And it's built on the back of 12 oxen. The statues of 12 oxen, because that's what it was in Solomon's Temple.
And so I remember I got to go through, I've gone through two temples, their dedication period. One was in Manhattan. Manhattan, and I think Singapore, somewhere in the east, are the only two that are not freestanding buildings.
Because they're in major cities where there's no freestanding buildings, no place to build a freestanding building. So you have to buy space in a building to do it. But when I went to the Manhattan Temple, we went into the baptismal area, and there's the 12 oxen.
And as we walked around the top, I noticed the network cabling holes in the floor, because they hadn't installed the computers yet. But what happens is, you have to, to get into the temple, you have to get what's called Temple Recommend.
And some, some bishops, to get your Temple Recommend, will actually require you to bring your W -2s, so he can check your giving records and make sure that you tithe on the gross and not the net. And it can be pretty strict, but you have to be, you know, in good standing with the church and not using tobacco or caffeine, things like that.
You get your Temple Recommend, you go in, and for the baptism of the dead, you present your names. They are entered into a computer. And so when you go in to be baptized, the names will come up on a computer screen.
And so you'll have a guy who's the recorder, he'll read the names off, and then there's a guy, an elder, down in the, in the baptistry, who is baptizing, and on average, you'll be baptized 50 times per session.
So what you're going to see here is that happening from a secret cam from just a few years ago. So let's, let's take a quick look at it. Pretty wild, isn't it? And then you leave there, and you go into another room, where you kneel down, and you have elders, and you have the same names.
And these elders are now, they're wearing their temple garments, which are interesting to look at themselves, and they lay hands upon your head, Sister Johnson in the name of, same names, to receive the Holy Ghost, lift the hands, put them back down, for each one of those people, checking off all those people.
Because what are the four fundamentals of the faith? Faith, repentance, baptism, laying on of hands. So you've got to do the baptism, laying on of hands, and so now, if you did that on behalf of everybody who's in the spirit prison, as long as they have faith and repentance, they can now get out and go into the, into paradise, and receive celestial glory.
So you're saving the dead. So there's baptism of the dead. So those who accept this, now if you're in a spirit prison, there's people who can go in and out, and they're telling you how to do this, why you wouldn't accept this, I don't know, but only a certain number of people do, who end up going to paradise.
The rest, at resurrection, these are the only places they can go, to these different levels of glory over here. But to get into the highest level of glory, you have to go through the Mormon temple ceremonies, and things like that.
So let's go up to this top point here. At the resurrection, this green line's resurrection, okay, this line crosses out, so you're resurrected, you go into the celestial kingdom. But there are different levels in the celestial kingdom.
If you were married for time and eternity in the celestial marriage ceremony, then you bring your wives with you, and it's really interesting, it's not going to be long before polygamy is legal in the United States, you realize that.
Obergefell ended any meaningful definition of marriage in the United States. And so, unless something changes, and Obergefell is overturned, Utah will have polygamy, and the Mormon church does not want it.
Isn't that funny? The Mormon church doesn't want it, they don't know what to do with it. But they're going to be stuck with it. And I think it's going to result in a major split, personally, that's my little prediction.
But you can be sealed to many women, even after you're dead, Joseph Smith's been sealed to hundreds of them. You take your wives, highest level of glory, you organize a planet, you engage in relationships with your wives, you have spirit children, and once you've got enough spirit children, you organize another planet, you put your Adam and Eve on it, you start putting spirit children in it, you start the whole thing all over again, except now you're God.
You're God the Father. And you will be worshipped by your offspring. And you start the process all over again. They go through it, create more gods, create more gods, create more gods, that's why there's an unlimited number of gods in the universe.
It's an exponentially increasing number. Okay? But not everyone is sealed in the temple. Not all Mormons are. The vast majority of Mormons aren't. If you're not sealed in the temple, then your marriage does not last death, and you become, if you're a guy anyways, an angel.
So Noah is actually Gabriel. Who knew it? And by the way, Noah built the ark in North Carolina, and flowed over to Ararat, and according to Joseph Smith, the Garden of Eden was in Missouri. The St. Louis Cardinals always knew that, but nobody else did.
So there you go. So there's the celestial level, and it's considered to be the glory of the sun. Well, then, what about the rest of us? Well, at resurrection, those that go to the terrestrial and celestial levels of glory, they are resurrected.
See, it crosses that green line right here. And so they go to the terrestrial or the celestial. The terrestrial is the glory of the moon. The celestial is the glory of the stars. Now where did Joseph Smith get all that?
He got it from 1 Corinthians chapter 15. There's the glory of the sun, there's the glory of the moon, there's the glory of stars. But then Paul said there's a glory celestial and a glory terrestrial, which he just meant by heavenly and earthly.
And in fact, heavenly and earthly is how it's translated in John by the King James. So Joseph Smith looks at it and he goes, sun, moon, stars, terrestrial, celestial. Something's missing. Hmm. There should be a third level of glory, because there's sun, moon, stars.
So what he did is he took the first letters of terrestrial, slapped them on the last letters of celestial, came up with a new word Noah's ever heard before called telestial. And that's the level of stars.
And Joseph Smith said that if you were to, for a moment, experience the glory of the celestial kingdom, you'd immediately commit suicide to get there. That's how glorious it is. So can you imagine what the celestial glory is like?
Wow, it's just awesome to see. And if you look at the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, you'll notice that the upper stones up here are called sunstones. And then in the middle, you've got the moon and its different phases.
And then down here at the bottom, you have the star stones. So you've got three different levels of heaven in the actual architecture of the Salt Lake temple. It's been a while since I've seen that, but you see it absolutely all the time.
Now you'll notice that down here is hell. And we haven't explained this in a line right here. These are apostate Mormons. If you have a testimony of the Holy Ghost that Mormonism is true, that you deny it, then you don't go to paradise, you go to spirit prison.
And those are the ones who go from the spirit prison into hell. If it crosses the line of resurrection, that means you get your physical body back. Over here is Satan and the demons. And they were spirit children of God the Father who rebelled and were cast out of heaven.
They do not cross the green line. And so sort of the consolation prize of having at least been a Mormon for a while is since you got farther in the process and you got your physical body, you will rule and reign over Satan and the demons in hell.
But they're the only ones that go to hell. Over here, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, the worst of the worst, still get celestial love and glory. I've had many a Mormon pat me on the back and say, you'll make the terrestrial kingdom.
You'll make the terrestrial kingdom. You'll be fine. You'll be fine. You'll make the terrestrial kingdom. So you're judged by your works, you get your body back, but you're damned. You're damned. Ah, it's that language thing again.
Damned up. You can no longer progress any farther. You get your body back, but you've basically been neutered, so you can't have children. Because the power of God in Mormonism is the power of the priesthood and procreation, okay?
So apply this to our planet. God the Father is named Elohim. Elohim is a man from another planet. He was in a fallen state like you and I. He was redeemed. He went through the process of eternal marriage ceremony to his many wives.
He was exalted. He lives on a planet that circles a star named Kolob. This is according to the book of Abraham in the LDS scriptures. The LDS has four books of scripture. King James Version of the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price.
This is in the Pearl of Great Price. And he lives on a planet that circles a star named Kolob, and that's where we were all born as spirit children. And then when he had enough spirit children, then he organized Earth and created Adam and Eve and put the first souls in them, and we all lived in this spiritual preexistence.
Now you may ask, why don't we remember them? Well, other than Shirley MacLaine, why don't we remember the spiritual preexistence? And there's really no official answer for that other than so we can live faithfully and be tested into mortal probation.
The old Mormon woman's idea back in the 1800s was that since you grow to be about six foot tall in the spiritual preexistence, when you cram a six foot tall spirit person into a little baby, they lose their memory.
That was the idea amongst Mormon women back then. Of course, they were polygamists and they had 40 kids, so how could you not come up with an idea like that? So that was, if I had that many kids, wouldn't you start thinking strange things?
I certainly would. Anyway, so God's first born spirit child on Kolob is Jesus, who is Jehovah. One of his other early sons is called Lucifer. So Jesus and Lucifer are spirit brothers, as we are with Jesus and Lucifer.
All of us are spirit brothers or sisters with Jesus and Lucifer. What happens is when it's time to create earth or to organize earth, not create earth, Jesus presents Elohim's plan, which is free will.
You'll all have a choice whether you become gods or not. But Lucifer, of course, is a Calvinist. And so Lucifer is going to force everyone to become a god. And so a vote's taken, and the Calvinists lose, and they get cast out and become Satan and the demons.
There are a bunch of spirits that don't fight as valiantly against Lucifer and the demons, and they're cursed to be born with a black skin. Until June 8, 1978, when Mormonism forgot all about that, or tried to, even though the documentation is still very clear that that was the theology.
And Brigham Young even preached a sermon which said that the day the priest was given to blacks is the day the church goes into apostasy. That was June 8, 1978. But the vast majority of Mormons have no earthly idea of any of that any longer.
That's just simply the way that it is. Now you're looking at me like, no way. I know a lot of Mormon people. They're smart. They're intelligent. They're all through the military. They do civil engineering.
They're intelligent people. Yes, spiritual insight is not a function of intelligence. And you can be extremely intelligent and believe utterly foolish things, but please do not, do not think that Mormons don't have their apologists.
They do. I like to, if we had time, I'd role-play a Mormon and bring some of you up here. I bring Aaron up here because he deserves it, is I bring Aaron up here and I'd role-play a Mormon with him. And I'm undefeated.
I really am. They've got their stuff. And if you want to see, I did a dialogue last, was it last summer or the summer before last? I think it may have been last summer, may have been less than a year ago with Alma Allred up at the University of Utah.
And Alma, sharp, sharp Mormon, don't walk out of here going, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. There's no one, I'm going to go save all the Mormons. Yeah, good luck. They have their apologists.
They have their argumentation. It's normally way, way, way out there, but just, just trust me, okay? It is wild. And it does remind me of Isaiah 29, 16, you turn things upside down as if the potter were thought to be like the clay.
Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, he did not make me? Can the pot say of the potter, he knows nothing? Well, yeah. Real quickly, sharing with Latter-day Saints, then we'll take the questions that we had before.
Any other questions you have, try to wrap up as fast as possible. Sharing with Latter-day Saints, be patient. Leaving Mormonism is not like being a Lutheran and becoming a Methodist or something like that.
It is very frequently a cultural thing, and it very frequently takes a lot of time to get someone to really consider the claims of Christ. Be aware of the language barrier. I've only given you a few examples, but there are many of them.
For a Mormon, everybody is saved, but only they will be exalted. There's a difference between salvation and exaltation. Exaltation to Godhood. Three, be sensitive to the individual's experience of belief.
This has become more important because Mormonism is changing, and I'm encountering Mormons now that are willing to admit that 90 of the criticisms I made of Mormonism in the 1980s are true. Yeah, yeah, Joseph Smith has it.
Well, did any of you see the video that Apologia posted, what, about three days ago, of me witnessing to the young Mormon guy? Yeah. Check it out online. It was just last week, I think, that we did this.
You know, this young Mormon guy is going, yeah, yeah, Joseph Smith did that. Yeah, he did that, too. I'm not sure really how we explain that, and that just didn't happen in the 80s. It just didn't happen.
You've really got to be aware of where they're coming from these days. Focus upon the central truths of faith. There's only one God who can save, Jesus Christ, our Creator, the all-sufficient Savior, and salvation is God's gracious gift.
Who is God? Who is Christ? What is the gospel? Those are your goals in talking to the Mormon people. Now, you may have to take some detours. You may have to talk about the Book of Mormon, Dr. Coates, false prophecies, first vision.
There's just so many things in Mormonism, but those are the goals that you want to be focused upon, not anything else. Be prepared to share why you accept the Bible as the perfect authoritative word of God, because the eighth article of faith, the Mormon church says, we believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly, which means a myriad of different things to different Mormons.
For most Mormons, it's that the Bible's been changed, it's been corrupted. And so they will—the first people that ever threw alleged contradictions at the Bible were Mormons. That's where it all started for me.
Avoid side issues that lead to blind alleys, like polygamy and things like that. If preexisting belief in Joseph Smith and the LDS church stands in the way, make sure you can back up any statements you make when dealing with Smith or the church.
So, in other words, you know, the Godmakers film came out, everybody watched the Godmakers, and went off and started witnessing the Mormons, and when the Mormons say, where do we say that? Well, I saw it in a film made by ex-members of your church.
Oh, yeah, that's going to have a lot of weight, isn't it? I mean, think about it. Someone comes up to you, you're sitting at a park bench, you're reading the Bible. Some guy comes up to you and says, is that a Bible?
Yeah. Are you a Christian? Yeah. Ah, it's just all a cult. It was all made up. Oh, really? Have you ever read the Bible? No, I haven't, but I saw a movie by a Satanist about it. Yeah, you've got a lot of credibility in my eyes.
How about you? Well, we can't expect the Mormon to give us credibility if all we know is, I saw a movie by ex-members of your church. You're a cult. Yeah, that's great. You might want to be able to back up any statements you make when dealing with Smith or the church.
Don't get in over your head. Utilize support systems. I've just seen too many people get on their white horses, go off to save the Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, end up as Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses.
Not a good thing. Share positive, challenging Christian literature. I remember once, I sent Alright once, The Holiness of God by R .C. Sproul. R .C. did not write that book for Mormons, but I thought, hey, you know what?
It talks about the true God. Let's go for it, you know? And finally, live the Christian life not just in being kind and compassionate, but in living a holy, godly life, not because you have to, but because you love God and wish to bring Him glory.
You're a walking contradiction to the Mormon teaching that they are the only true church. One other last thing, just for the fun of it, and then we'll take the questions and wrap things up, because I'm, if you don't mind, I'm getting tired.
I was standing a lot last night, I don't know if you noticed that. Anyways, oh, sorry about the, hi, Mr. Video Man, I'm so sorry I moved over here. How many of you remember Battlestar Galactica? Yeah.
Not the new one, the original like 1978. In fact, didn't Apollo just die? I think the actor that played Apollo just died like within the past six months or something like that. It's like, I can't be that old.
Anyway, but I remember, I remember watching Battlestar Galactica, and one of my, my uncle who had fought in the Pacific in World War II was watching this episode with me, and he started quoting the Bible to the TV, and I thought he was nuts.
He wasn't nuts. If you remember Battlestar Galactica, who were they led by? Adama. And who is Adama? Adama was the leader of the Council of the Twelve. And they're the head of the humans, his son's name Apollo, and what are they doing?
They're searching for the human homeworld. What was it called? K .O .B .O .L. K .O .B .O .L. K .O .B .O .L. And in one of the episodes, they are, some of them are captured by these glowing humanoid things, and everything's white and glowy, and at one point these humanoid things say to them, as you are, we once were, and as we are, you may become.
Which was, that was the episode that I was watching with my uncle when he started quoting the Bible to them, and he evidently knew something I didn't know, because every one of the writers of the original Battlestar Galactica were returned LDS missionaries.
Every single one of them. You go back now, watch it. It is soaked in Mormonism. You watch the marriage ceremonies? It's the eternal marriage ceremony. And Lorenzo Snow, fifth prophet of the Mormon church, as man is, God once was.
As God is, man may become. Becomes a line in Battlestar Galactica. And that's what my uncle saw. He didn't know anything about Mormonism, but he knew it was wrong, and started quoting the Bible to him.
Fascinating. Fascinating. So, Mormons have their impact. They have their place, and so there you go. All right, real quick, questions. Let's get to them. Dropping trash on the floor, man, I'll tell you.
Go ahead.
I don't know if, since the doctrines, I believe that the doctrines of the beliefs of Christos not published.
Yeah, yeah, well it's published, we just can't get ahold of the book. Oh, okay.
All right, well, you know, I was just kind of, I was just kind of disappointed in the fact that, like, you know, the basis of the debate was about the Trinity, and you guys kind of only talked about, like, the Son and the Father, but not really about the Holy Spirit.
So I was just wondering, like, I was just wondering about the other side, like, what they actually believe about the Holy Spirit. I have no earthly idea. Yeah.
Okay. Obviously, we can, you have anything to add? Yeah, that's probably why I didn't bring it up. If they had a positive doctrine, they would probably use it as an argument, but I don't think they know.
So, but for me, the argument that I was making is if you see the New Testament differentiating between the three divine persons and identifying each as one being, Yahweh, there you have the Trinity. So that's why I focused upon that, not upon anything else.
All right. Thanks. Yeah.
All right. So in the debate last night, 1 Corinthians 11, 3 came up, and they had a translation, I think it was from the Simplified English Bible or something like that, and they were quoting, and it said that God—.
Believe me, I cannot keep track of the translations they were using. That's, no one, that's impossible.
It's almost like they were cherry-picking the translations. Of course not. No, no, no. Okay, but anyway, it said that God was over the Son, and then man was over the woman. Well, I looked at, you know, the Greek text, and the word is kephle, which would be the head, and so that could be translated a number of different ways, but that does have some relation to the way that the Son relates to the Father.
And I know, at least from my understanding, you are not an eternal economic subordinationist. So I was just wondering, how do you understand the word kephle to be used in that sentence? And what does it mean for the Father to be the head of the Son in relation to how man is the head of a woman?
Well, if I could get my cursor, it would work. Yeah. What I mentioned very briefly to him was that, what is the term used for the Son here? Hachristos. So we're talking about incarnate, we're talking about messiahship, we're talking about incarnation, we're talking about the position that the Son has taken in redemption.
And so the order here has to do with Christ as the incarnate one and his role in redemption. This doesn't have to do with it within the Trinity itself. And so you can assume, and some subordinationists do assume, that this order goes back farther than that.
I think that's one of the problems I have with the Grudem Ware argumentation, is I think it's going in the wrong direction. You don't go from the human to the divine, you go from the divine to the human.
And you cannot assume that because something exists in the relationship between Christ and his incarnate redemptive state and humanity, that that goes backwards into this relationship with the Father.
So here you have Christ, very clearly, as the term is being used here. And so the order is one, is a redemptive order, it's a order within creation. It's not referring us back to anything that happens in eternity or before creation itself.
Right.
And how does that relate to then how a man is the head of a woman?
Well, because just the same way that God determined that Christ would be the one in whom all things would be summed up, in the same way he's established male and female relationships from the beginning, as Jesus himself taught in Matthew chapter 19.
So those male and female relationships are determined by God and the way he created the—well, not only the way he created man and woman, but the way he created marriage and the marriage relationship and everything related to it.
So that's what I was referring to in regards to his trying to say this is an ontological statement. It's not an ontological statement, it's an order—a created order statement.
Thank you for your presentation on Mormonism. I've watched it before, but I have not encountered enough Mormons to want to delve into it more. But I've always wanted to ask, what exactly are universes to them?
How do they function? And when I hear about— I'm sorry, what exactly are what? Are universes, are multiple universes. Because when I hear about, you know, God's going to their own planets, I almost think that's just a synonym for universe, the way I hear it get used.
Yeah, you're looking for consistency there, and there's the problem. There are huge holes, because you've got to understand, like I said, if Joseph Smith had not been killed in 1844, if he'd been just given a number of years to keep coming up with the wilder and wilder stuff, no one would be able to put it together.
And so even as it is, none of that stuff that I was telling you about is in the Book of Mormon. None of it is. It's down in the Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl Gray Price, it's not found in the Book of Mormon.
So originally, it's pretty clear that Joseph Smith's idea was this was all within this universe. But as Mormonism, once he died, then there was change and evolution, especially once they got to Utah, where they're just all alone, echo chamber time.
And in that context, that's where you start getting this development of universes instead of just planets within the universe. So they end up existing side by side. They don't really make sense together, but it's because it's a human system that's developed over time, and it's self-contradictory.
Thank you. You're welcome. All right. Dr. White, I actually have two questions, if that's okay. You know, if my granddaughter looked at you, she would say your hair fell off your head onto your chin. I've gotten that one before.
Because she said that to me. Isn't that what Clementine would say?
She says it to me, so yeah. Yeah, my dad always said it migrates, so it just migrates. Yeah. Yeah, well, all good men come out on top.
Yeah, exactly. Whenever my dad said that, I always said to him, and grass doesn't grow on a busy street, and I said, or through cement.
So there you go. My mom said that first comment, grass doesn't grow on a busy street. I got two questions, actually. If that's okay.
We'll take one at a time. Hopefully. I don't know. Well, it all depends on Aaron, because he's walking down here, and he looks mean. So, you know, he may limit you.
Well, we'll see how long the first one takes. So there is that reference in the New Testament to the baptism for the dead. I believe it's in 1 Corinthians 15. 1529. How do you work with that quickly, you know, with Mormons who are citing that saying, oh, this baptism for the dead is in the Bible?
I know it's kind of a weird passage. Well, they definitely use it.
That is their whole basis for it. The problem is that to be baptized for the dead, you have to have, I didn't go through this. I did really simplify the Mormon presentation. I apologize, just simply amount of time.
You have to hold the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods, and the best way to approach the Mormon issue of that topic is the priesthood, because the Bible is so plain on what the priesthood really is, who the Melchizedek priest is, all the rest of that kind of stuff.
That's the best way to go. We have a tract called, what was it called? Well, we have a tract on the subject of the priesthood. I think we have it in PDF format on the web, too, that really helps you to go that direction.
In dealing with 1 Corinthians 15, what is being said there is there's nothing in the New Testament about people having a priesthood, restoring priesthoods, temples. No one was getting baptized in temples or any of that kind of stuff at that particular point in time.
Instead, it says, what shall they do, else what shall they do that are baptized for the dead? If the dead rise not at all, why are they then baptized for the dead? Notice when I first studied that, I saw an interpretation that says, what shall they do?
It made reference to a group called the Corinthians, who in the early church were a group that did baptize for the dead, and it was referring to this heretical group. Well, I don't think Paul would make reference to some outside group along those lines.
Instead, I think there's a simpler understanding, and that is when it talks about baptism of the dead, it's not baptism in behalf, proxy baptism in a temple, which Christians never built, using a priesthood, which Christians never claimed, to accomplish something Christians ever taught in the place of the dead.
It's the fact that as people would die, people would be baptized into their place in the church. And so why would we replace, why would we continue to baptize people into a church where they're being martyred for their faith, if the dead rise not at all?
So remember, the context of 1 Corinthians 15 is an apologetic for resurrection. It's against those who are denying the resurrection. So I say, why do we continue doing this and bringing people into the church, taking the place of those who have died, if there's no resurrection?
Thank you. Did you have a second one?
Real quick. Oh, I can go to the back of the lines. My other question is more of like one about your career. Who's the, would you say, the toughest or sharpest apologist you've faced, and what's the most difficult non-Christian faith to debate against that you've found in your career?
People always ask me that question. I really don't have any good answers, because every debate's different, and the context of each one is very, very different. You know, I would imagine this debate I have next month with Peter D. Williams seems to be a really sharp guy.
Anybody catch the Unbelievable Radio broadcast? I linked to it. I just linked to it. It just came out. Did you hear it? It was a pretty good discussion, wasn't it? He's a bright guy. Yeah, it was a really good conversation.
I think it was one of the best conversations I've ever had with a Roman Catholic. If you don't know what I'm talking about, there's a radio program called Unbelievable on Premier Radio in London. When I was in London, I don't know, a month, month and a half ago.
I lose track anymore. I'm going to be there a few weeks again, so it's sort of confusing. But I did two Unbelievable Radio broadcasts, one with Yusuf Ismail on the Resurrection, actually the Crucifixion of Jesus.
And then Peter D. Williams and I discussed whether the Reformation was a tragic mistake or a necessity. And it was one of the best conversations. I've been on Unbelievable, I don't know, 14, 15 times now.
And that was one of the best conversations we had. So he's going to be a challenge. See, you can have people... Every time I debated Gerry Madetich, it was a complete challenge because he would just stretch all the rules of debate all the time.
And debating him is like dodging someone who's throwing knives at you all the time. So there are people who are just like that. Robert St. Genes is really tough to debate for the same type of reason. But those are debate reasons.
They're personality reasons. So, you know, I've done debates with... I did a debate with a Muslim. The Muslims were complaining about the guy. So those are really hard because you're still trying to accomplish something positive even though the other side just isn't even there in the debate.
So it's really hard to answer that question because there's so many different factors that goes into who's a good debate opponent. Is it good because they really know their stuff and they're good at communicating?
Or because they're really good at bending the rules and making it really hard for you to make your points? So that's a really tough question to answer. Thank you. Uh-huh. Yes. Yes. I see you're sitting there.
And that means we only got two more left.
So considering that not all Mormons believe in Mormonism, but they stay in Mormonism because of their families and friends. Yeah. There's a lot of nominal Mormonism. Yes. Yeah. How would we approach them when we're sharing the gospel?
Well, you've got to remember, you have to try to find out by talking to them how deeply influenced they've been by Mormonism. If it's all they've ever known, they may not know all that stuff real well, but they're still going to translate most of what you say into a foreign context that you may not want to be trying to communicate to them.
So no matter what, you have to build the bridges and you have to be very careful to define your terms and recognize that pretty much what they're thinking of is a works, righteousness system. And if they've got any level of exposure to Mormonism, look, the God we just described is not a sufficient source for the grace of the Christian faith.
So any redeemed sinner from another planet, that's a problem. So it does add some level of effort on our part to make sure that we can clarify. But at the same time, if you don't have to bring up Mormonism, if it doesn't come up, don't bring it up.
Don't drag stuff in and don't make it all that more difficult in the process. So you have to find out how much they've been influenced by it as to how that's going to twist your words and just make sure to be very clear in your presentation.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you. I suppose for the last question, I was wondering, you talked a lot and showed a lot of the reliability of the New Testament and everything, but I was wondering if you could show us a little bit of the reliability of the Old Testament, by chance.
My understanding is that the church here actually had a presentation on that about what, I don't see the pastor any longer, but they had $8 million worth of Old Testament manuscripts here, I don't know, six months ago or something like that, about a year.
Okay. So you've had something like that. Now, discussing Old Testament reliability is a completely different subject because you're talking about a much more ancient text and a very different transmission methodology because the Old Testament is primarily covenantal documents given to a specific people.
And so instead of what you have in the New Testament where the gospel goes to all the world, the Old Testament scriptures are primarily for the Jewish people, the people that are going to produce the Messiah.
And so the method by, and then it gets really complicated because you've got the Hebrew Masoretic text, you've got the Greek Septuagint, you've got the Targums, you've got the Peshitta, you've got all sorts of stuff like that, and different translations over time and things like that.
So it becomes extremely, let's just put it this way, I don't know, I certainly could not make it nearly as interesting as the New Testament presentation can be. It's not that there's not good information on it, it's just extremely complicated and really hard.
It would take much longer because you have to define so much stuff and it's a real challenge. It's a real challenge. All right? All right, giggles, here you go. Keep it going. Dr. James White. Thank you.