Introduction and Welcome

Dan Wotherspoon [00:00:00] Mormon Matters Podcast is a production of the Open Stories foundation and is seeking to build financial support separate from Mormon Stories Podcast. All donations to Mormon Matters are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonmatters.org. Come, come ye saints, Nor toil nor labor fe. Welcome everyone to another edition of the Mormon Matters Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Wotherspoon and I'm really thrilled to have a special guest with us. I don't know, Brian, should we start have God on today? We'll get rid of the teasing there. We have Mr. Deity. Brian Dalton on and the reason I'm doing this podcast this week is sort of as an oversight from earlier this year when we were studying the Book of Mormon in the LDS Sunday schools and we were in those sections in second Nephi 5 and the Jacob sections and things like that. And I really wanted to do a podcast on Book of Mormon racism and what does the text say versus what do we often bring to the text and things like that. So this week, where was it? Probably two weeks ago, Brian, you, you released A way of the Mr. Which is one of the Mr. Deity sub podcasts. What do you call it?

Brian Dalton [00:01:42] I just call it the Way of the Mister. I don't know, I guess, you know, it's. I wanted to be able to do things that were not strictly deity oriented. And you know, Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have the Way of the Master and I just thought the way of the Mr. Is a good, is a good title for that. So. We do, we do. We've only done three, I think so far, but I have a ton of ideas that I want to do, but some of them are too expensive to produce on my own. I got to get a little more money. So we're hoping to turn this into a non profit at some point. But they are, if you're familiar with the Mr. Deity show, that's a show where I play the deity and it's kind of conversations that you would have that you want that I imagine God would have to have at some point with his various minions, Jesus and Lucifer and Larry, of course, everybody knows Larry from the Bible. I'm kidding, of course. And the way of the Mr. Is just an offshoot of that. It's kind of the same mindset, which is why I stuck with the way of the Mr. Part of it. But it's not, you know, it's not the characters from Mr. Deity or anything like that. They can be pretty much anything I want them to be.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:02:58] Right, good. And we'll talk a little bit more about that. I definitely want to do a first section, but it's a side project, and it's more you saying. And the characterization I would give them at least is it's more direct. You're not just sort of teasing. Oh, if you take the text literally, you'd go here. Ha ha. So therefore, people shouldn't, you know, they should examine whether the Bible and these stories about virgins being stoned and homosexuals being killed and all that stuff should be taken literally. You kind of play with that in a fun way. And Mr. Deity here, you're explicitly saying, this is wrong. We need to do something about it. And you're far more direct. So anyway, you bringing this thing up says, I've been mean to do a Book of Mormon racism and those sections especially. Anyway, so I'm thrilled that this came up. And then besides you, of course, we have a favorite here at Mormon Matters. Charlie Harrell is back with. Charlie, would you remind us a little bit about your background, and then I'll tease whatever I want to about you?

Charles Harrell [00:03:55] Sure. I teach courses at BYU in manufacturing and manufacturing systems. Also am a founder of a software company called Pro Model Corporation, and I dabble a lot in Mormon doctrine and theology. Last year, I wrote a book called this Is My Doctrine, the Development of Mormon Theology. And in that book, I kind of trace the development of Mormon thought from actually from Old Testament times through the New Testament and up to modern times in terms of how different people in different periods viewed the same doctrines that we understand and appreciate today.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:04:38] Awesome. And that's exactly why I have you on, because you have that whole sense of the context of Mormonism as something beyond just the last 20 years of rhetoric and positions and things like that. Wanted to bring you on. Well, I also wanted to make sure to tease that you've been interviewed by John Dehlin and also wanted to make sure that people are reminded that, Brian, you also were interviewed by John Dehlin over at Mormon Stories. So I will link to both of you guys for our audience that want to get deeper into who you are, your background, your personality, sort of a little bit more on that personal level that John takes you. So you both should be well known to our audiences. And. And I'm really thrilled to have you both on. Brian, is there anything more you'd want to say? I was mostly focusing on your work with Deity and way of the Mr. What's your broader. Just what do you do for a living? How does Deity and these other projects fit into you putting your life together?

Brian Dalton's Background and Creative Work

Brian Dalton [00:05:37] Yeah, well, I did graphic design for 25 years. I was also a musician in and throughout that. I. I got a record contract with Embryo Records when I was 19 and ended up not going on my mission. I was in the missionary training center for about six weeks. Gonna go to Recife, Brazil, when it became clear that Lex Diazevedo wanted us to do an album. So I left there and came back home. And then I stayed in music for a while and went back and forth to it. I do all the music for the show and I still enjoy doing it, but it's not something I. I do in any professional capacity anymore. And what I'm doing for a living right now is this is what I do. Miss the Mr. Deity Show.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:06:22] Awesome. Well, that's neat.

Brian Dalton [00:06:23] I am supported by donors and subscribers and good people who like the show and want to see it continue.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:06:32] Well, congratulations. That's living the dream.

Brian Dalton [00:06:35] Yeah. Yeah. And I left the church in 1993. Just so people know. I was 27 when I left formally.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:06:42] Did you coin the term or you just make famous the term for Foreman?

Brian Dalton [00:06:46] I believe I coined that term. I came up with that in a hot tub in San Diego in 1994, I think.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:06:54] Former Mormon.

Brian Dalton [00:06:55] I actually remember the first time I used it because I said to myself, I said to a guy sitting there in the hot tub with this, I'm a former Mormon or a foreman, I guess I could call myself. And that was the beginning of the term Foreman.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:07:08] Well, it's great to have you. And I've enjoyed the gentleman teases of Mormonism through Mr. Deity. I can't say I enjoyed exactly what you did with the way of the Mr. Episode. Some of those things will come up there. But certainly I think we're going to end up seeing by the end of this that you and I and Charlie, I'm guessing this is true of you and you can soften it or whatever. I think we're all going to land in the same place in terms of this rhetoric about skin color equals indicator of righteousness, needs to end, needs to be eradicated. It needs to leave the Mormon mindset altogether, you know, leave a terrible distaste in anybody's mouth if they ever get wind of it again on a Sunday or any kind of rhetoric. So I'd love to see it go too. But our, you know, the way that you've spent Mormonism being in a trap by the Book of Mormon and this being a central piece of the Book of Mormon and all the different things that your podcast does, doesn't quite strike me as clean and simple as you do. So. Okay, at this point, let's just. If everyone who hasn't heard it, you're going to hear it now. We're going to play the way of the Mr. Episode. Those of you who are listening to the podcast will only get the audio version. We will link on the website to the video version so you can see it through YouTube. So you're going to miss a little bit here just hearing the audio, some of the settings and some of the quotes that Brian has put on the screen and things like that. But I think it's important for us to at least put this six or seven minute piece in so that everybody can hear what we're talking about.

The Mr. Deity Video on Mormon Racism

Brian Dalton [00:08:53] Do you believe that dark skin is a punishment from God? A curse? No. Neither do I, unfortunately. Many of our friends and neighbors belong to a religion which teaches that very thing. You know them as the Mormons. This is the Book of Mormon, the founding document of the Mormon Church. It tells the story of a group of Hebrews who came to the Americas supposedly around 600 BCE. Once here, they divided up into two groups. One good, the righteous Nephites. One bad, the wicked Lamanites. And just so nobody would be confused, God marked the wicked people with a sore cursing. Can we get a reading, brother Bri. Bri. Wherefore, as they were white and exceedingly fair and delightful, them that they might not be enticing unto my people, the righteous Nephites, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. And thus saith the Lord God, I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people. Because we white and delightsome types really do find dark skin loathsome. And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed. For they shall be cursed even with the same cursing. And the Lord spake it and. And it was done. And because of the cursing which was upon them, they did become an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety, and did seek in the wilderness for beasts of prey. Because everyone knows the dark skin makes you idle, full of mischief and subtlety, and gives you an uncontrollable urge to hunt. The Book of Mormon is a long book. And all throughout the evil dark skinned people, the wicked Naamanites are warring with the good light skinned people, the righteous Nephites. In the end, the bad guys Win the Lamanites wipe out the Nephites around 400 CE. And that was supposed, supposed to explain why there were dark skinned people living here in the Americas when Columbus arrived. They were cursed with that dark skin by God. That's what I was taught as a child growing up Mormon. Of course, that's ridiculous, right? We now have a pretty good scientific understanding of what causes one person's skin to be light and another person's skin to be dark. And so far as we can tell, it has absolutely nothing to do with a curse from God. Only the truly ignorant still believe something like that. The exception is the Mormons, who are one of the most educated groups of people on the planet. And let me be clear here, your average Mormon is not a racist. That's not what I'm saying here. On the Contrary, in my 27 years as a Mormon, I don't think I ever met a racist. So why would the Mormon Church allow this racist idea to remain part of its holiest book? Because they have to. The idea is so essential to the Book of Mormon story that to get rid of it would be to undermine the entire Book of Mormon and thus the entire Mormon faith. The founder of Mormonism never intended the Book of Mormon to be an allegory or to be taken figuratively. This book was supposed to be an actual history of the pre Columbian peoples of North, Central and South America. Mormons teach and believe that the Book of Mormon is the keystone of their religion and literally the most correct book on earth. Mormonism is not like other religions where you can pick and choose which parts you believe in, their leaders speak directly with and for God. So you're either all in or you're all out. This book can only be the most correct book on earth if God really does punish people by darkening their skin. If dark skin is a curse, as Mormon scripture clearly states. If not, this thing is a fraud. For more than a hundred years, the Mormon Church did not allow blacks to hold the priesthood because of this idea that God punishes people by darkening their skin. That ended in 1978. But the Mormon Church can never do away with this awful racism because again, this idea, this racist idea is essential to the Book of Mormon narrative, which makes it essential to Mormonism. Very few people know this about Mormons, but I'm hoping to change all that. If you agree with me that this is the most racist idea in human history, I want you to pass this video along. Send a link to a friend, post it on Facebook or Twitter, or start a super PAC and run it 247 on the her Story channel. Then the next time you run into a Mormon, ask them politely if they believe that dark skin is a punishment from God. Or as the Book of Mormon says, literally a sore cursing. It's time that people know about this horribly racist idea. An idea which remains a central theme of a book. Mormons claim to be the word of God. If a group of 14 million people worldwide believed something like this about Jews or Christians, that group would be the moral pariah of the modern world. And yet, because this is a religious belief, Mormons have gotten a pass. That has to stop. And Mormons have to be held accountable, even those running for high public office. Of course, I must admit that I haven't been completely fair here. The Mormon God is not a total mambo fella. He has provided a way for people with dark skin to rid themselves of their sore cursing. All they have to do is believe in the Mormon gospel, and soon their scales of darkness shall begin to fall from their eyes, and many generations shall not pass away among them, save they shall be a white and delightsome people. It's good to be white and delightsome.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:13:45] Oh, crap.

Brian Dalton [00:13:46] I'm right in the sun. Courtesy flag. Courtesy flag. Don't want to get the dark skin thing going. Yeah, this is the Mormon prophet. Yeah, it's the deity. All right, you know what? Stop groveling. I'm looking at the text here, and this white and delightsome thing is going to kill us. We got to change it to pure and delightsome. Yeah, I get that. It's supposed to be my perfect word in 1830. It sounded great. Now it sounds really racist. Yeah, I get that. I'm supposed to be transcendent, too. All right. No, I mean, if there are other white and delightsome references, I don't know why we have to kill those. You mean in the book itself? Well, that's really late in the book. I mean, who's going to read that far? The faithful can't even get past Second Nephi. I mean, you've read the thing. I assume you couldn't get past Alma. Well, you know, that's okay. I mean, you know the Christians, they can't get through their book either. Yeah, Mark Twain really was right, huh? It's chloroform in print.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:15:11] All right, well, Brian, that has its laughs, it has its smiles. It also has its gut punches and things like that. What's going on in your head when you produce something like that? And let's talk a little bit more in the course of this Conversation too, about its difference in tone and things from the, from the Mr. Deity. But what led you to say, here's something I want to do, I want to do it right now. I want to call Mormons on their stuff. I want people to raise consciousness about these teachings. What's going on in your head? Were you just trying to hopefully get something in there that would trip up Mitt Romney?

Reactions to the Video and Its Critiques

Brian Dalton [00:15:48] Yeah, you know, that's, it's funny because everyone keeps talking about the Romney link. I don't mention Romney in the thing I make a comment about as people hopefully just heard that, you know, I would like to have every Mormon asked, do you believe that God punishes people by darkening their skin? And I mentioned the thing about, you know, even those running for high public office, which is obviously it's coming at a time where we have a Mormon running for high public office. But it wasn't specifically attended to him or anyone in particular. The catalyst for this episode began long before anyone knew Mitt Romney was going to be the nominee. The reason I started writing this, and it was quite a while ago, it was much earlier in the year, was that a BYU professor had said some fairly racist stuff about how basically God was doing the blacks a favor by not letting them held the priesthood because that way they don't get to the top of the ladder and it's a much softer fall, which was awful. And I was reading all of the write ups about this going on and there was a persistent question about why don't Mormons just get rid of this whole racist stuff? And to me the answer was obvious. You can't get rid of it because it is so incredibly part of the Book of Mormon. You just can't. If you get rid of that stuff, you gotta chuck the whole thing. You gotta chuck Joseph Smith being a prophet or connected to God in any way. And, and they can't. And so that's what inspired me to start writing the piece. And it's just a matter of the fact that I went through a lot of personal things earlier on in the year. I had all kinds of production things going on. I was shooting stuff for other people as well and I just didn't get to it. So the timing of it, while it may seem like there's some political connection to it, there is not in any way. It had nothing to do with Mitt Romney or any Mormon running for office.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:17:51] Okay, appreciate that. So, yeah, Randy Botts, the BYU professor that kind of started that. We did an episode for listeners who are coming into Mormon matters lately. Where we spent a good couple hours on Mormon racism and the sort of thinking and the predicament that Mormonism is in or, you know, and some of the ways ahead. So Mormon Matters has already wrestled with that a little bit. Brian, at this moment, you said, for instance, you said through your own thinking, they can't get rid of it. There's too much at stake. There's too much at stake for whether or not Joseph Smith is connected to God at all and things like that. Do you really stand by that or again, I know that's what the piece said as I listened to the way of the. Mr. It's all these either ors, these blacks and whites, the if this then that it's presented certainly in a way to be persuasive, even the humor and everything is working towards, you know, no other conclusion. But this is ridiculous, that this is truly the central message or such a central message of the Book of Mormon that there's no wiggle room. Is it truly your state or were you doing a piece of work because you want this beat up, you want this idea eradicated?

Brian Dalton [00:19:05] I absolutely believe that the idea that God punishes people by darkening their skin is a vile, evil, disgusting idea and that you cannot separate it from the rest of the religion. The whole book, the entire book is based around these two peoples, one of whom has been cursed by God with dark skin. And you can't just decide that you're going to get rid of that. And the proof, by the way, that I'm right is that they're not. The Mormon Church is never going to get rid of that. I don't care what liberal Mormons want to think. I don't care what they want to. There's no way you can get rid of that without it destroying the very foundation of the question of Joseph Smith's prophetic mission. He's done, it's over and for me he's done and over anyway, so it doesn't really matter. But people to me need to understand that this book is definitionally and at its core racist. It's a racist idea. He tried to explain why there were dark skinned people here in America. People came here, they had this Bible that they thought explained the world and here's a whole bunch of people on this continent that people don't understand where the heck they come from. Lost Tribes of Israel. It was a good guess. It was an absolutely good guess. This is what religions do. They make a great guess which is then later shown to be completely false by science or whatever and then People cling to it regardless. That's what religion is. And to me, you can say it's black and white or whatever you want to call it, that it's a racist, horribly racist idea. I can't think of a more racist idea that God himself says that dark skin is a punishment from him.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:20:52] Okay, Charlie, do you disagree with him? That's a despicable racist idea. You can't think of anything worse.

Charles Harrell [00:20:59] Well, I would agree that if that is the case, if that is the intent of the Book of Mormon and if that is the sole message of the Book of Mormon, then that is certainly very negative, and it's not something that we're going to extract from the Book of Mormon. I agree with Brian that nobody is going to. The Church is not going to change the text of the Book of Mormon. But of course, the Church has a long history. At least readers of the Scriptures and scholars in the Church have a long history of reinterpreting passages in the Scriptures. And certainly there is a different sense and understanding of the passages that Brian alludes to today among many people in the church than there was in Joseph Smith's day.

Brian Dalton [00:21:49] Well, of course there are. Of course there are, because we now understand it's a horribly racist idea. Of course they're going to interpret it differently. Well, but they're not shocked at all.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:22:00] Right. But. And part of the thing, and you know, we've circulated some stuff ahead of time, the question is, are you relying on the text itself or a reading of the text itself that's purely innocent, or are you bringing lots of things to the reading of the text and emitting other possibilities for what might have been going on in somebody like Nephi's mind, Jacob's mind, or things like that, when they're talking about skin color, cursing and marking and things like that. So whereas Charlie is saying scholars throughout Mormonism, certainly long before the DNA challenge about all Amerindians are Book of Mormon peoples and all that stuff from the early 1900s, Mormon scholars have been looking at the Book of Mormon as small group of people within larger populations. They've been looking at the presence of others. There's plenty of spots within the Book of Mormon that give this broader context, as well as lots of people, including Joseph Smith himself, talking about prophetic prophets not being inerrant. And so when you see words of prophets in print doesn't mean that they're perfectly conveyed as God's will. So all those kinds of things I definitely want to have a discussion with, but go ahead and come Back to either me or Charlie.

Brian Dalton [00:23:18] Yeah, I guess the difference between you guys and me is that I take the book at face value. I. I take it as the way Joseph Smith said. You know, I take it for what he said it was. He's translated by the gift and power of God. It's saying exactly what he wants us to say. For Christ's sake, He's talking to God. You know, I love how constantly throughout religious history, people claim they're talking to a transcendent source, and then we find nothing, but not only not transcendent, but actually vile ideas. Genocide, misogyny, homophobia, racism. This is not God. I don't know what you people need to figure out. This is not God talking. First of all, I don't even believe there's a God. But if you're talking to a morally transcendent source, who's telling you that, oh, I'm gonna curse people with dark skin. I'm sorry. See ya. I'm done with you. The same with genocide. The same with homophobia or sexism. I'm just done with you. If you're going to make the claim that you're speaking to some transcendent source or conveying to me what you're saying better be transcendent. This is not transcendent.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:24:28] So the broader. Obviously, there's a broader critique of all religion going on here. And even though within the tradition itself that we're specifically dealing with here, Mormonism, we have lots and lots of resources for basically challenging everything you said in terms of what's the nature of prophetic development and things like that. There's lots there. Again, you're certainly bringing the broader critique of religion and the idea that if I'm going to even mess with this thing, better be transcendent, better show itself, or screw it.

Brian Dalton [00:24:59] There is never a shortage of apologetic bs. That's what I've come to find.

Examining the Book of Mormon Text on Race

Dan Wotherspoon [00:25:04] Okay, well, let's. Charlie, is there anything you want to jump in right here? But let's maybe do what we at least plan to do, which is kind of take a look at the Book of Mormon text itself, the passages that you're referring to, the sort of sensibility that you're bringing in in terms of not only what Joseph Smith said about it, but mostly I want to deal, first of all, what the text itself actually says versus what we bring to it. And then we'll talk about whether or not even if. So we'll kind of do that on its own terms. Then we'll do with the Joseph Smith as a Translator and what that says about his particular status. And then we can kind of hammer out all this stuff here again at the end. But, Charlie, I want to just happen

Brian Dalton [00:25:40] to have my stick of Joseph right here with you.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:25:42] Awesome.

Charles Harrell [00:25:43] Good.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:25:43] Me too.

Brian Dalton [00:25:44] All right.

Charles Harrell [00:25:45] I think this is useful to him to look at the nuance of a lot of these passages because, as we're seeing, they are being taken different ways, and that doesn't mean that we necessarily have to agree with all of the ways that they're being interpreted. But I think it's good to get a better picture of the lay of the land by seeing the possible meanings that might have been intended by these passages.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:26:10] Terrific. So let's play a little bit. And Brian, I appreciate your right to throw out flames, apologetics, bs, and all that kind of stuff. Throw that out and sort of, you

Brian Dalton [00:26:27] know, I'm from the Christopher Hitchens School of Religious tolerance.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:26:32] Well, good. Well, what we're gonna. What I'll at least do and represent here. And I'm grateful to have Charlie as somebody who's more in touch with the history of interpretation and the different views of what a revelatory process is and what scripture is and things like that, you know? Yeah, you can call it all apologetic bs. I trust that the listeners who been listening to these podcasts for a long time will know that there's a lot more substance to the things that we'll be saying than can be totally thrown away by just something like that. So let's see. Yeah, so, for instance, let's look at the passage that you mostly. When you had Brother Bribri do his reading and you're doing. So we're in the second Nephi, five passages. So let's just take. I mean, I don't quite know whether or not we want to do. Obviously, we need less. Okay, let's at least know what we're talking about. So we have a situation here where. Okay, so first of all, we're going to step within the. In the context of the book, let's say what it is, what it claims to be, which is the writings of ancient people. In this case, we have three major narrators. We have Nephi, we have Mormon, and we have Moroni. They claim to be, you know, ancient beings are telling a real history. They're recording things that they've said to their people, their own experiences and whatever with God. And so within the structure of this, let's see if it says exactly what you claim it says. So why don't you go ahead and read us Brother Bribry again, Where do

Brian Dalton [00:28:08] you want me to start?

Dan Wotherspoon [00:28:08] Why don't you just start with 21 through 23 again, I guess.

Brian Dalton [00:28:11] Okay. And he caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint. Wherefore, as they were white and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. And thus, saith the Lord God, I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquity. And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed, for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing. And the Lord spake it, and it was done. And because of their cursing which was upon them, they did become an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety, and did seek in the wilderness for beasts of prey.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:28:58] All right, good. So you went through 24, which is good.

Brian Dalton [00:29:00] Oh, I'm sorry.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:29:01] No, that's fine. Because you put it in there. And it's certainly an interesting thing that I'd love to deal with that too. So let's just do a little bit of some possibilities here that might lead to some different interpretations. In other words, this looks pretty clear. This is Nephi saying, this is what God said to me. And if we were to have this perfectly from God's mouth to my ears heart stuff, if it was pure, if it's never misunderstood, if that were the view of Revelation, then absolutely this looks like exactly what you're saying. But let's imagine that Nephi is who he says he is. He was educated in Jerusalem. He was at least somewhat of raised by a prophet. Certainly within the wider context of Israelite culture, there's lots of emphasis upon the importance of the covenant people remaining with the covenant people and not intermixing with groups around them. So, for instance, if the Book of Mormon and we don't. We can, or we don't have to. I'll post some article links and things like that really suggest that there's the presence of lots of other people that the Nephites and the Lamanites, well, the whole people of Lehi landed themselves not in an empty continent, but there were neighbors and things like that. So if the presence of other people to intermarry with were sort of brought into this as a possibility, and we look at verse 23, especially the cursing of the mixing of our seed with others. And if we can find cursing language or the thought that it's an abomination or that you will definitely bring upon you the wrath of God or the displeasure of God by marrying outside the covenant, it does make some sense that Nephi here and Jacob, we'll see later, depending on how many passages we actually do. I don't know how many we'll need to do to sort of at least have people get the gist of the kinds of places that I'm coming from here. If we have that as a situation. This almost actually speaks more towards, towards Book of Mormon historicity in its own way, because here's a character acting the way somebody who had come from Jerusalem over here would when he sees his people. And again, this comes 18 years after the separation of Nephi and his people from Laman and Lemuel and their people. There was earlier in this chapter, he talks about how they were going to kill me. The Lord told me to get everybody that I could take with me. So I got Sam, I got Zoram, I got some of my sisters, and I got anybody else who would come with me. So it's possible that this, you know, other people's interactions had already happened at this point. And so there they are out there on their own and 18 years later or whatever, and I'm just going from the dates at the bottom, quite a few years later they encounter these people, they begin to have these contentions with one another. And it's clear to Nephi that there's been some intermixing going on. And Brian, you yourself say, in the way of the Mr. Episode that, you know, science doesn't have any, you know, science can explain how skin color happens and we understand genetics and things like that. So why Mormons would have to think that this is anything other than Nephi noticing that this next generation is darker through intermarriage with apparently whoever. The indigenous peoples of the Americas that they're mixing with are perhaps a little bit darker. Even though you'd think that Nephi and his gang are pretty swarthy, Middle Eastern, you know, looking sort of people anyway. So why would we assume that this is anything more than genetics, especially when there's the emphasis on mixing seed and being cursed. And this curse is of course, according to. It's sort of the language of covenants and things like that. So I don't know, I've thrown some things out there. I probably have a bit more to add in there. But do you want to respond at this point or. Charlie, do you Want to add things that I didn't say or that you disagree with?

Charles Harrell [00:32:49] Well, yeah, I think Dan presents one possibility here that there were interracial marriages taking place with the, the other inhabitants of the Americas. I think it is important though to clarify that the Book of Dan points out that there are some suggestions that perhaps there were other people here. The Book of Mormon itself never expressly that there were other people here, nor do they. But then they never deny, they never come out and explicitly state that, that there were no other people here as well. So we really don't know for sure. Although the text. I think Brian would probably agree with this, that the straightforward, the kind of face value reading of the text kind of leads one to believe that there were no other people here. But the, the other point then that you bring out is that you state that there probably were just these interracial marriages and the people that they married with were of a darker complexion and that that is the explanation for it. But then we have to deal with the phrase in verse 21 that says the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. And so the implication would be that, that this is the mechanism that God used to cause the sin of blackness to come upon them, that is through interracial marriage. Is that kind of the implication?

Dan Wotherspoon [00:34:32] I'm not sure what you just are asking there, but certainly the Lord God doing it. Again, all the different qualifications for what does it mean to be a prophet? Are you inerrant? This has been your mindset. You were raised with this idea that a cursing from God comes when you're doing this. Therefore you're seeing now evidence after interacting with these guys, after you've been away from each other. And it is interesting, Brian, when you brought up the Verse 24 stuff about being, you know, going for beasts of prey and all that stuff, we do seem to have at least implied here that there's a difference. Nephi talks a lot about planting crops and growing things and his people prospering and really doing good things. And my guess is whatever this separation would be, it's sort of implied within the text that perhaps Laman and Lemuel and those that, you know, they were associating with and intermarrying with were maybe more of a hunter gatherer sort of society. And so you can see a guy go like, oh, I'm up there plowing my crops and doing this and stuff. And they're just going on hunts every once in a while. The rest of the time they're sitting around you can sort of see a little cultural bias and stuff there. That certainly isn't God saying, yeah, they're all. Anybody that seeks beasts of prey is a sign of idleness and lack of worthiness.

Brian Dalton [00:35:48] Well, here's what I would say to your quite imaginative explanation of the text. To me, the question is, what's the simplest explanation? That's what you look for in science. That's Occam's razor. Do not multiply beyond necessities. The necessity that I don't multiply beyond is I look at the text and I say, this is a guy writing this who was living in a society where Native Americans were looked down upon as heathens and uncouth and all of those beautiful things that Brigham Young mentioned and he wrote a racist story. That's it. I don't have to go all through these machinations. You know, it's the old line, if you're in America and you hear hooves, you think horses, you don't think zebras. To me it's, you know, yeah, you can. That could explain it. Is it more likely than that it's simply a guy who's living in a racist society and he writes a racist passage and claims that he's doing it in the name of God? I don't think in any way your explanation is in any way more explanatory or efficient than that. To me, it's very simple.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:37:01] Well, you know, efficiency, yeah, fun to play. Occam's Razor. Another one of those, like, flamethrower type statements that it's easy to dismiss. So what I hear out of this though is you don't. There isn't a real strong desire on your part to really read the text or to imagine not bringing all that 19th century stuff to it. So in this section where we said, let's look at the text within itself, within its own worldview and structures, we know that we have a pre. Scientific people here. I mean, Nephi would still have been the way that anybody from the ancient world back then, the sort of.

Brian Dalton [00:37:34] Well, see, you're talking about Nephi.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:37:35] Well, the sort of thing, you know,

Brian Dalton [00:37:37] we might as well be talking about anything. Fictitious character from history. You've already gone so far beyond what I'm willing to entertain for the sake of this thing. You know, you gotta meet people at what they can get to. I can't get to Joseph Smith being a prophet, period. So to talk about Nephi as an actual character, we might as well be talking about Harry Potter as far as I'm concerned. And then anything's possible. And this is the problem with the supernatural is that any explanation is as good as any other because everything is possible in the supernatural realm. But in the reality of the world generally, if somebody claims they have a transcendent source that they're talking to and they say stuff that's not only not transcendent but completely evil and wicked, you just dismiss them. That people don't do that in religion is one of the most mind blowing things to me. And I think quite frankly it's a dangerous, dangerous thing thing that people do not dismiss the evil because they're saying that they're doing it in the name of God.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:38:43] Clearly that was a message of the way of the. Mr. And we had structured this so this is the kind of stuff that you absolutely get to do at the end of the podcast.

Brian Dalton [00:38:51] Oh, okay. Sorry about that.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:38:52] Well, I mean we structured it that way. We said we'd take this. Let's actually do a reading of the text itself instead of all this external stuff that you've brought to it. Then we said we'd do a section where we talk a look at Joseph smith as the 19th century author and what that might mean mean for these things that you say are so central to Mormonism and that for me and for, you know, again, I studied religious texts from out the world. I've studied scripture. I have a feel for what scripture is. I have a feel from my own religious experiences and things like that of, you know, insight coming in a certain way and then having, reflecting on it over and over again and having change and having it be sort of all of one piece and not in clear language, that stays once and for. And when I see evolutions even within a Book of Mormon over a thousand year period, that doesn't stick with the script that you're saying that the Lamanites are the evil people at all times. There's plenty of times where the Book of Mormon itself overturns that the Lamanites become the more righteous people. There's places there when it talks about the curse being lifted from them and it doesn't talk about skin in these cases. It talks more about spiritual countenance and the fact that they've been been folded into the covenant so therefore there's no more curse that comes up if they were to intermarry with stuff with us. When I see within the text itself a much more complex picture than your episode does and certainly none of your oh, religion is all BS and prophets have to be transcendent and perfect. You can play on that all that you want, but it doesn't touch the complexity of the text here. So I either.

Brian Dalton [00:40:37] Well, I don't believe there's complexity in the text. I mean, that's an assumption that you're making and you're free to make it. I don't think it's complex. I think it's very clear what it says. I think it's very clear what they meant. If you look at the history of the church and how they treated people with dark skin, there's no complexity. You're finding complexity because you want to. Because you want to believe that something is true that clearly isn't. I'm fine with that. Okay? But to me, it's blowing smoke up my patootie, you know, and I'm glad people get to hear another side of this. You if, if that's your philosophy on this stuff, because you can do all the mental gymnastics you want and people do it in every religion. That is why I am an anti theist. I think it's a very, very dangerous way of thinking and what we're seeing now is the danger of it within the Islamic world. So that's a whole other subject. And I don't know that we need to get into that, but that's my position is that there is no nuance, there is no subtlety.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:41:33] He.

Brian Dalton [00:41:34] That's fine, but the guy that you're talking to here is. We're not on the same page, so I don't know what good it does in. Well, let's do this and talking about all the complexities of scripture and how we, you know, that's all fine for the academics and all that. I'm not an academic. What do you want me to say?

Dan Wotherspoon [00:41:52] Okay, well, let's do a couple things. Let's have a little conversation here. Maybe we'll leave it for the audience to listen to or maybe we'll just make this side conversation with us. But let's at least imagine for now that this would, would be something that we'll present to the listeners. So we're at a pass here where, you know, the rules have changed in the sense that we agreed to do. We agreed to follow one thing. And so if we're not even going to get the chance to, to do the, the complexifying of the text and showing that there's multiple readings to this, that it isn't this clear and simple, that there's lots of assumptions and lots of things that I think it's clear, Brian, that you're bringing to this in terms of religion and its value and what?

Brian Dalton [00:42:35] Well, first of all, let me revelatory. I don't feel I agreed to anything. You sent me an outline you want to make, you know, you want to go through those points, but that's fine. But I get the right to say, you know, at some point. Well, I think that's crap, you know?

Dan Wotherspoon [00:42:50] Well, and that's going to talk to

Brian Dalton [00:42:53] you about the complexity of something that I don't believe is complex. So I don't know what you think I agreed to. I agreed to an outline of what you were going to talk about it, and then I get to have my say. And now it sounds like you're getting all, you know, all up in your hissy about me not playing by the rules. Well, you know, this is my point of view. I don't know what you want me to say.

Charles Harrell [00:43:15] It seems to me one of the key issues that this was all about is the relationship between the reader and the Book of Mormon, in other words. So I'm thinking that there's two ways to approach this. One is to approach it trying to defend the text itself and the book. The other is to approach this from the standpoint of what do believers in the book take away from the book? And it seems to me, Brian, that one of your condemnations of the book is the fact that the believers in the book really do literally believe the book, and they are. Therefore they have to be racist if they believe the book.

Brian Dalton [00:44:03] Right.

Charles Harrell [00:44:04] Okay.

Brian Dalton [00:44:04] Shall we talk about that? That's a great thing to talk about. You want to talk about that?

Charles Harrell [00:44:08] Well, I think that would be a good thread to take, because part of the discussion then, that Dan is pursuing here is to. I mean, Dan, you can approach it from the standpoint of maybe this is what the text is saying, or maybe the text is saying this. Or you can approach it from the standpoint of, hey, this is how some Mormons, many Mormons view the text and why they don't have a racist. Excuse me, a racist bent, because they don't understand the text that way. Whether that's a correct reading of the text or not is almost irrelevant from that standpoint.

Brian Dalton [00:44:48] Right. Well, I would love to address that if you want to. If you want to. I don't know if we're still recording or not.

Debating the Origins and Complexity of the Book of Mormon

Dan Wotherspoon [00:44:53] Well, I'm fine with leaving all this in.

Brian Dalton [00:44:55] Oh, okay. Okay, great. At some point, I would simply say this. I kind of went out of my way, or at least I tried to. At least to say that Mormons are not racist. I do not believe Mormons are racist at all. As I mentioned in the thing that there are 27 years that I had in the church and I don't think I ever met a racist. I think Mormons are some of the best people on the planet. If I had my druthers and I were moving into a new area and I could pick my neighbors, I would probably pick Mormons. I really like the people. So this was directed only at the fact that there is a book which Mormons find holy that says something that I find incredibly vile. Now, to that extent, Mormons are in no way unique. I find virtually every holy book vile in some regard or another. As I mentioned, genocide, racism, homophobia. There is vileness all around in every religion. And I didn't want in any way for, for people to think that Mormons are in any way racist because of this. But these things are in every religion and what people do. Sam Harris makes the point very well that people are expert now in actually ignoring what their texts say. And to a certain extent I say to them, at what point do you have you ignored so much of it that it's fair to me to ask what the hell are you doing in this religion? And to me, if the entire premise of the book, the entire premise of the story is that there are two peoples and that one of these peoples is dark skinned because God cursed them with dark skin, if that is not such a central idea to the book that you, you don't find repulsive. You know, I'm questioning, I am questioning kind of what type of person you are if you don't find that idea just horribly repulsive. Now a lot of people will say, yeah, I find that idea repulsive. But you know, there's all the other good stuff and they'll, and they'll do the machinations, the mental gymnastics to get through with it. And I think that's what they do. I don't think this kind of thing causes racism. I do think that if you're a transcendent God and you know what the heck is going on and you can see the future, you don't put something in a book like this that's coming out in a country that is filled with racism and is going to cause all kinds of gratuitous suffering, which it did, it has, Mormons didn't allow blacks in the priesthood till 1978. That's a lot of gratuitous suffering. And I know those are two separate issues because the Book of Mormon thing doesn't have anything with, to do do necessarily with keeping blacks out of the priesthood. But again, it's just my question, where is the trans.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:47:58] You did say that in way of the Mr. Though you did tie the 78 stuff and dark skin there when you really know it is. Well there is the curse of Cain stuff.

Brian Dalton [00:48:07] Yeah, but there is a connection. It's still dark skin is God's sign that these.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:48:12] So it's easier for us to buy the Kears of Cain stuff because of the Book of Mormon in the minds of some of those folks. Is that what you're saying there?

Brian Dalton [00:48:21] I don't say that again.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:48:24] Well, I guess I'm saying you're saying there is a connection when you know, obviously the Book of Mormon peoples are just stark skinned native Amerindian type skin coloring and the priesthood bans against blacks. And so most people look at the priesthood plan and the stuff that's in Brigham Young's mind when he's saying the different things he's doing and all that is sort of buying into the curse of Cain and you know, the different stuff that's in the air at the time. And so that would be probably more appropriate to the 1978 stuff than the Book of Mormon. So what I was just trying to clarify when you said well there is a connection is that you're simply saying because Mormons buy into the Book of Mormon and many of them would have read this as sort of curse and skin as a color of God, it was easier for them to believe the curse of Cain stuff. Is that what you're saying?

Brian Dalton [00:49:10] I don't think they needed it to be easier. I think when you're following a religion that says I talk to God and God says the mark of Cain is the black skin and will keep the blacks out of the priesthood, I don't think you need anything easy. I don't think you need another thing to add on. I don't think it hurt that you have it also in the Book of Mormon, but I think when you're part of a religion that says I speak for God directly, you know, and people buy that, they don't need anything additional to make him, you know, follow.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:49:36] I'd have to check your transition there in the way of the Mr. Again because it seemed to me like an unfair movement sort of implying that it was a Book of Mormon had an influence on that. So maybe it was a, maybe it was in a section where you just come out of talking about just talk to God transcendent, you know, a prophet.

Brian Dalton [00:49:51] Well, you know, it's all part of the same thing. I mean, it's black skin, a skin of darkness or blackness being God's way of cursing. And, you know, I mean, I had. I mean, those of you who know anyone who knows the whole former theological ideas behind why the blacks were kept out of the priesthood, I have a book here called the Church and the Negro, which, by the way, is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life because it has no imprimatur whatsoever. It's like nobody published this thing. Nobody wanted to have any credit for it whatsoever, but they were okay putting it out. It's the whole theology of the war in heaven and how some of them were less valiant and those are the ones that come down in the black bodies and blah, blah, blah, blah. The whole theology behind it works perfectly within the whole Book of Mormon scheme too, since it is passed on genetically through birth. You know, the curse, which again, you know, people have been trying to tell me, oh, well, the curse is withdrawing the spirit of God. Well, why are you withdrawing the spirit of God from a baby? You know, the curse is there on a baby as well. So I do think it's very much.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:51:05] Again, but the curse language was, for me, more out of an intermarriage and staying outside the covenant.

Brian Dalton [00:51:10] Well, that's your theory.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:51:13] Well, that makes sense. Well, but it clearly is implied within the text, I think.

Brian Dalton [00:51:17] Okay, well, you can read that the way you want. I'll just let you.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:51:21] So I have a feeling what people can land with here is you don't want to do a close reading of the text. You don't want to do a close reading of any religious stuff. You don't really want to do a deep dive into the nature of a transcendent God. You like that term because it's easy to defeat, because most of religion denies that certainly Mormonism denies explicitly that there's such thing as a pure revelation that absolutely escapes human minds and expectations and cultural presuppositions and things like that.

Brian Dalton [00:51:53] I know God is anti Reagan. He is the worst communicator in the history of the universe.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:52:00] Well, great. Well, guess what? In spiritual realms, most religions come across as, you know. Yeah, it doesn't come in language, and

Brian Dalton [00:52:06] that doesn't tell you anything.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:52:08] Hello? Okay, well, again, so I'm perfectly fine with you saying things like that because clearly one of us values religion, and it seems to me that you want all religion to explode, you know, and Mormons along with it.

Brian Dalton [00:52:24] I think religion and monotheism in particular has been the worst thing to happen to Humanity.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:52:32] And I would say that it certainly has many crimes, many things come, and many things do end up in these really rotten things when we have a supposition like this is God, and I exactly know the mind of God and all this stuff. But that isn't really a true wrestle with the whole world of religion. So that's why a Hitchens and a Dawkins and a Harris book, they don't even come across to me as even matching at all. My own experience with religion, not only in my own life story, my autobiography, how I've come to become a religious person, how I come to study it, the different types of experiences I've had within my own spiritual space, and wrestle with God. So none of those things even touch it. And I don't think that I sit around and say, you know, I let this thing stand because for the last 15 or 20 years in my Sunday school classes, I never let these Book of Mormon passages go, go without challenging them. And so I think there's lots of people like me out there. And I do see a way ahead that shows that this story that you say is so central, this theme of skin and righteousness and God cursing and all that is so embedded in the Book of Mormon. I can see Mormons completely getting rid of that thing as long as, you know, the guys at the top decide that it's time to finally, once and for all, read our scriptures for reason rather than just these assumptions that we've brought to them. So I see lots of hope for changing it, and I see it being changed all the time.

Brian Dalton [00:54:05] All right, well, I hope you're right. At that point, I think you've just completely made the religion pointless. Because to me, the greatness of Mormonism and its claim at least, is that we are the authority. We can tell you what God wants. We have a guy who actually, literally does lunch with Jesus, you know, kind of thing. And so we can tell you the mind of God. And the second you start going, well, you know what? This thing that our prophet said is kind of BS, and then this thing is BS, you know, the 78 revelation never says, and this is one of the things that I find outrageous, it never says, this is a horrible, evil, racist idea that we have been doing. This is terrible. It never does what it asks Mormons to do, which is go through the steps of repentance and say, I've made an error and how can I make restitution or anything like that. They somehow get out of it by saying, oh, you know, now we just have A different God changed his mind kind of thing. Well, you know what? At a certain point, you just got to call bs. I don't know. You know, you want to see all the complexity in it. I think there's this very simple answer to why all of these religions do this, this. And they're all speaking out of their, you know, what's, you know, they don't know anything about the mind of God, because in my view, there is no God anyway. So, you know, anyone who's claiming to talk about that, but, you know, the thing that I think people like you have to realize is that when any. Anytime anyone says that they are speaking for God, what comes out of it inevitably is some really bad stuff. Stuff. We're going to have some really bad stuff, because the second you get married to this is what God said, and this is what God wants. You cannot evolve. And now people in religions have done it, but to the extent that they've done it, they show their true colors. And, you know, I mean, they're true

Dan Wotherspoon [00:56:06] colors that they might. That they might actually.

Brian Dalton [00:56:11] That it was BS yesterday. That it was BS BS yesterday, and it's now it's BS today. But we're going to admit that it's BS except for we're not going to admit it because we have these wonderful things called apologists who can make up reasons for why it wasn't BS really, and why we're okay still. It's, you know, I just. Who wants to live? I don't understand. You know, when I left the church, I left the church after the September 6 thing, that was the final straw for me, because to excommunicate a historian like D. Michael Quinn, you know, just show him where he's wrong. You know, you can't. So you got to excommunicate him and take away any, you know, authority that he has within the church as being the amazing historian that he is. That, to me, was my Galileo moment. And what I don't understand is I, you know, I went to the Sunstone symposium after that, and people came up to me and, you know, I was kind of embarrassed. I said, you know, well, I actually left the church. And I don't know how many people said to me, oh, you're so courageous. I wish I could do that. And I'm thinking to myself, what do you. What is keeping you in here? I don't understand. You know, it's. My life is so much better not having to go through all these machinations. I mean, maybe yours is not. I'm not going to judge anyone's personal experience. I can only say that my life is so much better and so much freer and I'm so much more accessible to other inputs of information out there that, you know, I just don't understand why people in any religion try to cling to this stuff with apologetics. It's absolutely beyond me.

Dan Wotherspoon [00:57:50] Charlie, I have plenty to say, but I'll let you in if there's anything you want to frame here.

Charles Harrell [00:57:55] Well, I think Brian raises some good issues and certainly there is a lot number of members of the church who, in fact, probably the majority of the members who do view God that way, who do view revelation that way in the scriptures, that they're infallible, that they're transcendent, that they speak absolute truth. I think that there's a growing number of members though, who are seeing, as Brian points out, that, you know, the information is out there. It's not hard to discover, discover that ideas change, theology changes, scripture changes, views of scripture change. So a lot of things are evolving and developing. I know even in non Mormon, non LDS circles, there is a growing number of people who are looking at the Bible and saying, no, we really can't accept all that the Bible teaches. And they've developed, adopted a view that they call the best light view of scripture. For example, where you have Paul's New Testament teaching that women are to be silent in church. Well, you know, what kind of a God would say women can't talk in church and if they want to be taught, they have to go home and be taught by their husbands. And yet what Christians do and Mormons do the same thing. Nobody takes that verse literally, at least that I know of. And it's not that they simply ignore it, but they choose to look at other passages that shed a better light on the role of women in the church, where Paul actually talks about them having the right to prophesy in church. So do people pick and choose then? Yeah, that's what they do. They look at revelation as being progressive, that teachings today are probably closer to modern sensibilities than they were a couple millennia ago. And I think for many members there's a hope that going forward that teachings will continue to be conformed to scientific findings, to modern sensibilities. Now, does that mean that if you recognize that, then you might as well throw the whole thing away because it's useful? Or can you acknowledge that and say, wow, this is still a great tradition, it brings people together, it has some liturgical value. Some value metaphorically, there's a Lot of different ways that people still find value without just saying, we accept all the teachings of the scriptures the way that they're stated, or that they have a literal interpretation of Scripture.

Brian Dalton [01:00:59] If you're just going to follow along, though, with the way the human race goes, you don't need a book by God. That's completely behind the times. That's my whole point. The Catholic Church just came around at the end of the 20th century saying, you know what Galileo was. Right, Right. You know, jump on the bandwagon a little earlier. You know, I don't know, honestly. I mean, I get the existential angst. I went through it like nobody's business, trying to find meaning in a godless world, all that kind of stuff. I get that part of it and I get the part about culture. And I mean, I lost every friend that I had when I left the church because I was so in it. So I get all of those things. But if you're just going to hope that scripture follows along with human progress, you can just jump that truck for the one that's way up ahead. They'll hold up for you. We'll let you on the back and you can ride with us.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:01:58] Well, again, my whole thing is the people who really read scripture don't look at it the way that you do. They recognize, especially those that if we're looking at ones where they know the original languages and they see that the translation is completely misleading about what's poetry, what's song, what's, you know, this or that. You know, the whole Genesis account is clearly mythic there. And yet, you know, yeah, you can see all these people that do it literally. You know, when you're a child, you simply are presented a story that's simple and black and white and things like that. And you are taught to look at authority figures to help you negotiate. But all of human development, psychological stuff is. And including where you said, the great thing about Mormonism is, hey, we've got this guy that's doing the talking, so you don't have to do anymore.

Brian Dalton [01:02:44] All of it.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:02:45] Scripture actually points for you to have your own experience with God. I would that all were prophets. I would that people wouldn't fly to peace like glass if I were to say something that I see and I want to convey, but I know that they're stuck in these. These levels. But it doesn't mean that it is a purely apologetic move in the sense of it can be dismissed because, you know, apologists can't admit any, you know, any weakness in the Revelation. Holy crap. That's not at all what. Where I would come down. I want the things blown up that you want, but we have 14 million souls at stake here, Brian, in terms of. Not souls and in salvation, but let's just say we have hearts and minds to be one away from racism or things like that. Is blowing up religion really the way to go? Or wouldn't there be something towards an approach that I'm trying and certainly lots of people who are trying who've sort of wrestled with scripture and combined it with their own insight from their own dives into the mystical realm or whatever, and they're saying, I recognize in this a piece of God, but it doesn't, it doesn't capture God perfectly. And when we have so many explicit statements like this in Mormon, it's. I just can't see that you're going to be as effective in taking these souls away from racism through your approach, which this way, the Mr. Thing is completely just rhetoric that, you know, you're making these claims and you're not giving anybody any time to think. And then, you know, when we try to go in this podcast and let's rethink and let's take apart the different moves that you make and let's take apart the assumptions about scripture, you don't want to do that. So all I can say is clearly thank you for, thank you for articulating this. But, you know, we're speaking a different language and a different valuing for sure of what religion and the religious life is.

Scripture, Prophets, and the Nature of Religion

Brian Dalton [01:04:42] Right. You know, the thing is, I think I take the religion more seriously than you guys do. I take it at face value. When the Bible says, says if a prophet speaks something and it comes not true, he's not a prophet. I take that seriously. You guys are the ones who are basically going outside of the discipline. I mean, it's not.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:05:03] But if in other scriptures it talks about the complexity of the prophetic moment, it shows prophets doubting their own ability to convey what they want to say. When it shows prophets growing have an arc of progress within their own lives, why would you hold on and insist upon holding upon just these one things that, that make it such an easy strawman to just, well, if I've got

Brian Dalton [01:05:24] to figure it out, if I've got to figure it all out, I don't need you. I don't need your book, I don't need your profit. If I've got to figure it all out on my own, I don't need any of your baggage. I don't Understand why people want to. Okay, I got to figure it out. But I'm going to heap all this big pile of crap on my back that I can carry around with me, too. It's just so much easier here to drop the stuff that doesn't. You know, If a guy claims he's. I don't understand. I literally don't understand. If a guy claims that he's speaking for God and he says something that is in no way transcendent, I'm supposed to now make apologies for why what he said isn't quite. You know. But I still. I still am still buying what he says because to me, it's so simple. Somebody claims they're talking to God, you do what Jesus said, by their fruits, you shall know them. You look at it, you say, no, I'm not buying that. There's nothing transcendent about that. If you're preaching Bronze Age tribalism and you're claiming to be talking to a transcendent source, I'm saying I don't buy it. It just seems like the guy's talking about his own culture and the times, and this is what people thought, and there's nothing transcendent about it. If you're talking about a guy who claims to be able to translate some papyrus that's supposed to be the writings of Abraham and it turns out it's from the wrong century and it's a common funerary text from the Book of the Dead, I'm not going to make excuses for that. I'm going to say, well, he was just wrong. Apparently, in religion, no one is ever just wrong, just dead wrong. They are. They're wrong. That's all. And I don't need to get into the nuances of prophetic, you know, you don't understand. What you guys don't understand is how much you're already assuming and just buying into. When you go into this whole thing about what prophetic vision is like, it's such a tautology that you, you know, you've accepted. You know, it's like Joseph Smith saying that you can know the truth by, you know, you get this burning in your bosom. Well, who said? Well, I do. Oh, well, okay, that's good enough for me. It's ridiculous. It's a complete tautology. And what we know now from 400 years of the scientific worldview is that's not the way we discover truth. It's simply not. That's all I'm saying.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:07:54] I have millions of challenges of the scientific worldview, and I have Lots of different ways to, to come at you

Brian Dalton [01:08:01] if you know, science doesn't claim to be connected to a transcendent source. Science is human based and we make mistakes and there's built in error correction. There's no built in error correction. If you say that black people are cursed by God and therefore we're going to deny them equal equality. Equality. And you're talking to the God of the universe and he can't figure out to tell these guys, hey, this is evil, this is wicked. If you can't figure that out, I'm not buying that you're talking to a transcendent source.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:08:35] Well, and there is lots of correction in religion. There's lots of it. And it isn't just when they're caught with their pants down. To live a religious life and to play in religious disciplines. You're constantly revisiting, you're constantly pulling out something new. There's an evolution that goes on there. There is sort of measurements and whatnot as you resonate at different levels with people. You're able to see things, you're able to recognize subtleties, you know, across cultures. I don't know if you want to go with perennial philosophy or whatever, things like that. We have a very interesting mapping of realms of spirit that again, science can't really touch. But on the other hand, there's plenty of areas that science just by definition can't do it. I don't know if you ever want to play with inside versus outside, you know, the measurable versus the unmeasurable. You know, the level of connection at which all life organizes itself. You know, the interesting stuff lately, even with the slime that seems to have spatial memory, you know, Bohm's work on plasma clouds, sort of having the whole organize the parts deep. Spirituality is always about interconnection and things like that. And so science certainly can play with pieces and stuff like that. But whenever you go to the uniting parts, I think religion has a lot to say. But again, religion for me is not at all circumscribed by religious texts. My heck and Charlie, again, maybe you brought some things to talk about. What's the nature of scripture in general? It certainly is, isn't ever claimed the way Brian wants to put it out there as you know, this. I mean, again, people certainly have come along.

Brian Dalton [01:10:19] What are you talking about? It's not claimed?

Dan Wotherspoon [01:10:21] Well, by itself.

Brian Dalton [01:10:22] By itself, what are you talking about it's not claimed? This guy said this is the word of God. I am translating by the gift and power of God that is claimed. That's a claim. You don't want to say it's claimed because it's complete bs. That's a claim. Don't back off of it and don't try to apologize for it. These people take this is the word of God and the most correct book on earth. That's a claim. Geez.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:10:47] It's one claim out of lots of other claims.

Brian Dalton [01:10:50] That is the claim of the religion of the church that you don't want to accept. That is your prerogative. But that's what the church claims, along

Dan Wotherspoon [01:10:58] with lots of other things that say what you've just said doesn't quite claim.

Brian Dalton [01:11:03] That's the way Scripture is defeated.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:11:05] And what I was talking about with scripture is like for instance, the writer of Genesis and the redactor of Genesis, that's pulling the different parts together. He's not necessarily saying, I'm writing Scripture, I'm collecting. I'm, you know, taking the.

Brian Dalton [01:11:17] Well, we're not talking about Genesis, are we? I'm talking about the Book of Mormon.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:11:22] But you're talking about Scripture and transcendent things. And if. And if this is stuff, the same thing's going on here. Nephi seems to have a sense.

Brian Dalton [01:11:30] No, the same things are not going on here. We don't know the author of Genesis. We was. We don't know that. We don't have people on record saying this is the word of God. I am translating this by the gift and power of God. We don't have that for the Bible. We don't have that for the New Testament. There's none of that. This stuff is anonymous.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:11:53] Okay, you don't want to dive in, Charlie?

Charles Harrell [01:11:57] Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, we do have some for that. For example, the Book of Daniel. Most scholars accept that the Book of Daniel is the prophecy exeventu after the fact, that even though it says thus saith the Lord and it's presented as a revelation, most scholars accept that it is not that. It's simply rhetoric. Now, does that mean that they throw out the entire book of Scripture because of that? No, they just changed their view of scripture from being a transcendent book to something that is very human shape. And I think, Brian, you make a valid point of saying, well then what's the benefit of having scripture if it's all human anyway? And not only that, but it's behind the times, but it's leading from behind. Yeah, yeah.

Brian Dalton [01:12:53] To use Romney's.

Charles Harrell [01:12:57] But for many people it's still a source of inspiration and guidance. In other aspects, and just even the stories itself for a lot of people, even though sometimes there are stories obviously that don't present very ethical ideas. Judith and Tamar, where you have relationships between a father and a daughter in law. But this is an interesting quote from Carl Barth, who was a famous theologian, Protestant theologian. He said biblical authors shared the outlook and spoke the language of their day. And therefore, whether we like it or not, they did not speak a special language of revelation radically different from that of their time. In other words, they weren't necessarily transcendent. On the contrary, at point after point we find them echoing contemporaries in time and space who did not show their experiences and witness, often resembling them so closely that it is impossible to distinguish between them, not only part, but all that they say is historically related and conditioned. Now, most members of the church

Dan Wotherspoon [01:14:14] never

Charles Harrell [01:14:14] even entertain these kinds of ideas, obviously. But for people who get into the historical criticism and nature of scripture and revelation, you can't help but come to this conclusion. But those who have come to this conclusion, and I think this is, for me, this is the main point, is, is there still value, is there still worth in hanging on to a tradition, a religious tradition, pulling the good things out, the positive points, and trying to shape it in ways that are possible going forward into the future? Or you just throw it all out and say, hey, that's a bunch of bunk. Let's start on some other foundation that's totally non religious, that's maybe scientific or whatever, and see what we can build. So there's just a group of people that still choose to hold on to the good. So the question for me becomes, and that I'd be interested in hearing Brian's take is, is that bad? Do you find that unacceptable, someone who has reached that kind of conclusion?

Brian Dalton [01:15:34] Well, the question that I was always interested in, and I think it's one of the reasons that allowed me to investigate Mormonism as I did, was I was convinced that I had the truth. I was absolutely, my testimony was super strong and I was absolutely certain I was right. So I wasn't afraid of going out and looking into things like a lot of, lot of people around me were and were scared to death when I started looking into it because I felt I had the truth. Because my main question was I just want to know the truth. I want to know the truth. And to me it comes down to something very simple. And that is, what is the best way of figuring out what is true about the world that we live in? I don't find it in People who claim to know things from God, I simply don't. Is there wisdom in holy books? Absolutely. It would be so stupid to say that there's not. But when you couple those with the horrific things that are in these holy books, the problem is you can't throw out the bathwater with the baby. You just can't. Or if you do, it takes you 500 years, like it did with the Catholic Church in Galileo. These institutions, these organizations are an impediment to. To human progress and particularly with regard to Christianity. They set us back probably a thousand years with their wanting to get rid of St. Augustine's famous quote about curiosity and what an evil it is. These people have ways of corrupting the mind such that we don't move forward. And to the extent that people are keeping these ideas and that's keeping either them or the human race as a whole from moving on and progressing, I want it to be over. I want it to be done. And the problem that I have with people, I want to say this in the most delicate way because people like you. People like you. I like people like you, genuinely. I mean, I love Sunstone people. I love dialogue people. I love all of these people and they really help them, me, find my way out of the religion. So I'm especially grateful. I love the whole. You know, I love. I don't hate academia at all, you know, but in this regard, when you turn this stuff, I do think that you guys give aid and comfort, and I hate to say it that way, you guys, but I think religious moderates give aid and comfort to the people who can point to their books and say, ah, but you know what it says? We need to hate the homosexual. Because you're giving them some credibility for their books that say these awful and terrible and horrible things. And they just think, well, you're the ones who aren't getting what God wants you to get out of the scriptures. And you know what? They're right. They are right. They have the backing behind them. They're the ones who can point to the scripture and say that you're wrong.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:18:33] So for you, all religion go away. And the moderates are. We should abandon the moderate position in order to speed the demise of all religion.

Brian Dalton [01:18:47] Yes, absolutely.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:18:48] So rather than in the here and now, where clearly you guys aren't, you know, the radical, you know, secularists and stuff, and the pure critics aren't. They're not really scoring. So rather than have the moderates work within the text as it's actually written and what's been said about the text and all the different complexities that we're doing, we should not do that. And you're basically going to leave the religious radicals alone.

Brian Dalton [01:19:15] Marginalize them. Yes, completely marginalize them. Where it's clear to everybody on the planet these guys are nuts. These guys are completely nuts. Do what they're doing to Todd Akin. Do what they're doing to this new idiot who says that rape is intended.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:19:31] You know, if you get pregnant, God was involved with the cells dividing.

Brian Dalton [01:19:37] Expose their idiocy, don't give them cover. As long as they're getting cover by rather good people, particularly rather bright people, they're not going to be marginalized. They're going to keep doing what they do. And then you guys are going to have to fight them. You know, instead of fighting them, join us. That's what I'm saying here. And this isn't really my bag. I am not, you know, I do little comedy things in satire because I'm not really Mr. Super Confrontational. But on this issue I am, you know, the way I've put it to everybody in an argument that I've had about this subject is I say simply this, let me ask you this. Is the world a better place if people follow their holy books or ditch them? And virtually every person that I've spoken to to the person has said, okay, I have to admit, if they follow them seriously and literally the world is going to be a worse place and if they ditch them, it'll be better. That is my plea. That is what I want people to understand about the way I think about the world.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:20:48] So the fact that their scriptures are centuries old, they had a scientific understanding that's completely different than ours, they're to blame for that. The fact that they thought the firmament was this sort of substance that the stars and the planets were, and then that there literally were windows of heaven, that this firmament was held up by the pillars of the earth, there were waters above and below, and therefore you can explain a noaching flood and all those things because they're there and because some people take them literally and they reject science and all that stuff versus showing them within their own text the resources for the better things, the higher things that Charlie's talking about, they're showing within their text that these particular passages that they trot out as to support the anti same sex marriage stuff or to condemn homosexuals and things like that, instead of showing them within the books and within the riches of their religions themselves that these things are wrong. You just want to Speed, a complete polarization, a marginalization of these. The fact that they will no longer get heard and they might lead to even more religious violence and things like that. I just see yours as a recipe for basically, let's have more people blow up because they're not getting hurt at all. They're not being.

Brian Dalton [01:22:08] Well, I mean, statistically you're just wrong because the countries who are largely atheist and lean that way, they don't have more religious wars, they have better societies on virtually every standard of living that we're talking about.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:22:22] If you're talking about Europe, you're basically talking about. They're rejecting the things that happen when they tried to force secularism, you know, there. So all the different, really bloody.

Brian Dalton [01:22:33] And I don't want to force all

Dan Wotherspoon [01:22:35] the things that happen in Europe. Of course they're gonna go, of course they're gonna shy away from that. They're gonna shy away from the religious parts and they're gonna shy away from the radical secular parts there. And they're gonna kind of come with this sort of middle of the road, you know, political view of religion. It isn't it quaint and cute and let's get on to the real business of thinking and progress and stuff like that. The secularists are not, are not innocent here too, in terms of their ideas getting into the hands of ideologues and trying to force it. I mean, that's the history of Europe.

Brian Dalton [01:23:07] Well, I'm talking about an American style secular ideal. I'm not talking about

Dan Wotherspoon [01:23:16] colonists.

Brian Dalton [01:23:17] Now, obviously I reject that as well. But what I'm saying is you're talking about getting these people to understand these things from within their own text. Well, if the text can keep changing, then who cares? Why do it within the text? Just drop the text. And ultimately people have to be morally persuaded about right and wrong. We have to make an argument for right and wrong. And the argument can't be just because God said so, because we know God. God has said some horribly awful things in the past. So whatever you do, ultimately you're on my team whether you like it or not. Because we're both arguing for some kind of progressive ideal about how to think. And you're just including a few extra steps. But we're both going to get to the same place. I just think we'll get there. I just think we'll get there sooner if we just ditch what's holding us back in the first place. Because the second that you've said that you've told people that you're speaking in the name of God, it changes everything. And you almost can't reason at a certain point, which is, you guys are great because you've stepped outside of that. But there's a lot of people who will say, the Bible says so and that's all I need, or my Book of Mormon says so and that's all I need. And they're right. They're right according to their own inner dialogue with the church and with the scriptures as they're spoken. And that is just a tremendous impediment to progress. And not only that, but you've got the whole demonization situation, which certainly doesn't happen within the secular world in any way like it does in the religious world, where if you disagree with me, it's not just that you are, are not just that you have a different opinion. You are the children of the devil. I get in my email every day stuff from Right Wing Watch with everyone on the planet on the religious right telling how there was one today saying about how if you vote for Obama, you are voting for God to pour down his wrath on America. People don't need that kind of power and that's what religion gives people.

Religious Moderates and Closing Reflections

Dan Wotherspoon [01:25:40] Well, again, what you said that we all want basically the same thing is true. We want the rhetoric to change. We want people to have a much more reasonable thing. On the other hand, I don't share your desire to sort of eliminate the fact that there might be things that chemistry and biology and genetics and encoding and all that stuff can't explain about our experience. There is value in what has been traditionally the realm of the spiritual, the mystical, the prophetic. I think there are pieces of ourselves and our experience that we're basically having to say no to, that you're shutting off some riches by the pure trust in the kinds of things that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the different secular views are saying I love. For instance, I don't know.

Brian Dalton [01:26:33] I agree, by the way, I agree. Have lost things. I agree there is no perfect one way to do this where you get to partake of all of it. Absolutely right.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:26:44] So again, I don't want to abandon religion. But as far as people thinking badly, thinking in terms of I know exactly the mind and will of God, or that these scriptures are truly God's will. Again, I just think we're going to get farther by looking hard at the religions themselves and within their own resources for complexifying. And I know that that's at least most of my audience who come to these podcasts are saying, you know, I know that the Mormonism is richer than what I've been presented here. You've presented the cardboard version of Mormonism, of the Book of Mormon itself, of, you know, what it means to be a transcendent God, what it means to have the gift and power of God that, you know, by which Joseph Smith translated. These are. These are pretty much cardboard versions of the religion. And so.

Brian Dalton [01:27:29] They're not cardboard versions. They are.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:27:31] They are.

Brian Dalton [01:27:32] They're absolutely. This guy said, this is a recording of the people of Native America, okay? Jews came here, took up the entire land from the land north to the land south, from the land east to the land west. They had battles in the millions. They had swords of steel. You know, thousands fell by the sword. This guy made a claim which is just false. It's just false. It's not true. Why anyone would want people to be. To submit their lives to an idea that is not true is beyond me. I see the harm that it's doing every day because people find out that it's not true and their wives don't find out that it's not true with them. And then families are destroyed. We don't want that.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:28:14] We don't want that. I'm on record many times because some

Brian Dalton [01:28:17] guy lied 180 years ago, but again,

Dan Wotherspoon [01:28:21] who knows what this guy even.

Brian Dalton [01:28:23] Yeah. That you can't. That you don't think you can say the guy was just dead wrong after

Dan Wotherspoon [01:28:27] all of the evidence, I can say he's dead wrong. Wrong in assuming, like, if you're going to talk about the land north and south and talk about a continental thing, because within the text itself, it's clearly 200 miles by 400 miles is all that's said there. The fact that it's a dynastic history or a tribal narrative or, you know, a lineage history or a minority story of a group within a larger group, those things would be simply. If truly there was an abridged, he would leave things out. Nephi himself says, I've left out all the political stuff and things like that. I don't know why. But here in that very chapter that you're talking about, second Nephi 5, he's talking about. I'm just doing, you know, the. The more religious parts of it. We don't learn anything about his history, his family, things like that, whether his, you know, there's a very interesting and good book by Grant Hardy that talks about, you know, understanding the Book of Mormon and its complexity. And when you really dive in, this guy is a pretty interesting character, whether he's fictional or not. And Grant doesn't force you to believe that one way or the other. So, Brian, is it possible in your

Brian Dalton [01:29:32] mind though, that this is just an all and outright lie, that he just made it up?

Dan Wotherspoon [01:29:37] My guess actually, if you want to, is that there's certainly. It seems like the method of production to me strikes me much more as something that's produced in some kind of dissociative state. And so to me, the way it was transmitted, the not going back, the picking up where he's left off, the sort of flow of the thing, whatever Joseph Smith was going on, I can see him saying this isn't me. So therefore it must be the gift and power of God. And I do think the production of it is quite compelling as not just the work of a guy with a bunch of charts keeping track of hundreds of people and places and having it all be consistent. You know, again, maybe he's been working on that since he was 12 or 13 years old and he's got such a kind of mind that he could memorize it, but it just doesn't feel like that. So there's something going on with it. But whether Nephi or Lehi ever lived or breathed or if Mormon was a real guy, I'm trying to stay agnostic on doesn't change the fact that there's these amazing pieces in there that just they feel and taste like what spiritual experience feels and tastes. For me it's got these subtle shifts of things when you're centered in the right, that virtues flow from you. You get that in section or Mosiah 4 in the king Benjamin things. There's just these beautiful, beautiful passages. There's even things in the Book of Mormon like in Alma 42 that totally upset your view of God as can't be wrong. We have lots of things within Mormonism that God could cease to be God, that there's a higher law that God follows and stuff like that. So God isn't the God isn't the creator of all things within Mormonism. And to say that that's what we have to believe as Mormons just doesn't feel like a true description. You haven't put us in a box that you think you have.

Brian Dalton [01:31:33] Well, I'm not trying to put you in the box. It's Those guys, those 15 guys in

Dan Wotherspoon [01:31:38] salt Lake I want them to listen to too.

Brian Dalton [01:31:42] Well, let me tell you something, they're not going to.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:31:44] I know it and I don't worry about that. But I know that I'm able to present a version of Mormonism that enriches me, that when you say, go ask somebody about this or that or something. I have a little thing. I just call it my two questions. I can take the most radical person, and within two questions, I can get them thinking in a far more complex way or revealing the fact that they do think more complex in a more complex way than what they say in their Sunday school answer. It is time and time again, there's a lot more going on in people's minds than just the official rhetoric or just the sort of ritualized answers that we give in the church. Mormons are broader, deeper, more sophisticated. And, you know, I'm here to be a voice.

Brian Dalton [01:32:28] Yes. And the church doesn't want them to be. They don't like you guys. I mean, when you excommunicate a bunch of them.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:32:36] But that hasn't happened for a while.

Brian Dalton [01:32:39] Okay.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:32:39] It seems like they're shutting it down. And again, Brian, you're totally right. I think the church has trapped itself within its structures, and they have to have unanimous things. I have a sense that there's lots of people listening and all it takes is one or two votes and things don't change. So you're right. Progress is halted through the church and through. Always leading from behind, probably because of certain. Certain people. But I don't know that there's 15 guys not wanting statements against the racial stuff. You know, there might just be one.

Brian Dalton [01:33:08] Well, I wasn't talking about the racial thing in particular. I was just thinking in general. Well, I.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:33:13] You know, again, I've been a person of at least some stature within these communities for the last 15 years, and I've had encounters and I. And I don't sense that I'm the enemy or the kind of stuff that I'm doing is anything but encouraged by many of them.

Brian Dalton [01:33:29] I doubt your podcast is going to get on the official church website anytime.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:33:32] No, I'm already. I'm blocked. If you were like, to be at BYU or one of the institute buildings, you can't. You can't access mormonmatters.org so. Isn't that funny, right? Yep. So shocking. Charlie, we've been right. I think we're winding towards a close here. But, Charlie, I totally.

Brian Dalton [01:33:49] I'm feeling the spirit right now. It's the spirit of Mao, though.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:33:54] I want Charlie to have as much time as he likes just to frame and to do whatever he wants. And then we'll give you a final shot. Bryan, too.

Brian Dalton [01:34:03] Okay. All right.

Charles Harrell [01:34:05] I think this is a good discussion to look at the extremes that we can view the Book of Mormon. And I think we've looked at it all the way from the traditional view that this is the absolute inalterable word of God, that it's a book to be taken literally and at face value. And that has been ingrained in church members for many, many years. But that doesn't change the fact that there's also a growing number in the church who is trying to seek it in terms of, hey, this is culturally conditioned, just like any sacred text. And we need to recognize that and be able to accept the fact that these were humans, that it has human fingerprints all over it. Whether it's the original authors, the prophets, that they were historical figures, or it's Joseph Smith's imposition on the text, there are certainly human fingerprints there. But at the same time, coming back to just the racist nature of the Book of Mormon to say that there appears to be racist statements and racist implications by the fact that God changes skin color because of iniquity, and assuming that that is even the correct reading of the text, you still have a lot of other. And I think this gets into part of the nuance and the complexity of the text is that there are a lot of other statements in the text that speak of to tolerance of other races, of other peoples. In fact, in Jacob 3, for example, God actually commands the Nephites not to revile against the Lamanites because of their skin color. So there's actually a lot of teaching that we need to be tolerant of others regardless of their situation, their status in society and life. You have the statement about the plea in 2 Nephi that God denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, and so on, all are alike unto God. So I think these are the kinds of teachings that Mormons that most members pick up on. Whether you want to say that they ignore the other passages or just gloss over the statements about skin color being the result of iniquity and hardness of hearts. I think most members of the church, what they end up picking up on is more the concept of all being equal in the eyes of God and that we're not to revile or discriminate against anyone on the basis of sex of race or sex or societal status. So that's kind of my take.

Brian Dalton [01:37:23] Yeah, I'm glad that Mormons see it that way. Now, if you look at the comments of past prophets and stuff, the text didn't hit them the same way. So for me, this is again, leading from behind. When you have a transcendent deity and you have a prophet who is prophet, seer and revelator. I just expect a little more. I think Mormons should too. If we're getting nothing more than what humanity is coming to by their own wits and reason, it's Occam's razor. I cut off that which is not moving us forward.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:38:00] Terrific. Yeah, that's a wonderful place to end. I think I've had my basic say here. So, Brian, thanks.

Brian Dalton [01:38:08] Thank you. I've had a great time. You guys are awesome.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:38:10] I appreciate having you on. Let me go ahead and either say this out loud to keep, or we can cut this out or something. My goal for coming into this was to have you go full out like you have. Give you the chance at both the beginning and the end to say what your motives and what your overall stuff is. And I certainly have heard that my sense is. And the reason that I kind of felt bad that I didn't earlier in the year when we were in these Book of Mormon passages, where the scale, color stuff was coming on and you know, where me within my Sunday school class, I'm winning the day by the complexifying of it because it's pretty clear that everybody there is at least thinking inside the text. These are historical people. And when you kind of put it in the different ways that I'm doing, they're all seeing it and they're all so grateful and they're glad that this sort of burden is being lifted from them. So I want to still do at least a little bit more. So, Brian, a couple of options here. If I were to record, and Charlie, you're welcome to be with me or not. If I were to record a supplemental section here where I at least do 20 minutes on. If we think within the Book of Mormon story, what does a careful reading show? If we think within a 19th century production model by Joseph Smith, that it's, you know, what does it mean for this as the status of revelation or as scripture or how seriously we were taken. If we were to take those things and I were to do that, are you okay with me either just doing that or I would welcome you if you would like to let me do that, present it to you, and then I'm happy to give you 10 or 15 minutes of rebuttal or whatever long you would take. So

Brian Dalton [01:39:51] I don't need to rebut or anything like that, but add it on at the end and make it clear that it's a separate thing and that I'm not good and that I'm not there to report. I don't really care for you and your people.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:40:03] Okay, I'll do that by just leaving this little side conversation into the text here so people will know that I'm not trying to have the last word because the structure we had done was you couldn't have the last word. But I still wanted to present those things. I think I owe it to the listeners who aren't going to be quite as Occam's Razor settles at all or traffic transcendent God means perfect revelation.

Brian Dalton [01:40:31] I'm not like Romney in that way where I need the last word.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:40:36] Awesome, Charlie. Well, I'll talk with you afterwards about whether or not you'd want to be on that little supplemental piece with me. But thank you for being on. I love your just great groundedness, your sensibility, and we couldn't have done this one, not you as well. So thank you for being on.

Brian Dalton [01:40:55] Well, thank you very much. I've had a good time and hopefully nothing I said that you take personally in any way. I have great respect for every person on the planet, but particularly people like you. And I mean that. I'm not saying that as a joke. I mean people who really struggle with these things. Though I may disagree ultimately on the conclusions, I have such incredible respect for anyone who grapples with it. And the name of Israel is to wrestle with God. So good for you and I appreciate everything you do and everything you bring to the people who listen.

Charles Harrell [01:41:33] Brian, I appreciate your candor and frankness. Good to be with you.

Brian Dalton [01:41:36] Well, thank you very much. I've enjoyed this. Anytime you want to have me back on discussing anything, I'm here.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:41:41] All right. We're going to write those contracts like that ahead of time. Like the debate moderator thing, you actually have to let the other guy do what you said they would.

Brian Dalton [01:41:53] That's true. Funny. That's funny.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:41:55] We'll have a good time, but thank you so much, Brian.

Brian Dalton [01:41:59] Okay, I'll talk to you guys later.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:42:01] Take care.

Brian Dalton [01:42:02] Okay, bye.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:42:06] Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Matters Podcast. To discuss this podcast with others, please check us out@mormon matters.org to keep this podcast alive or to join our support community, please consider a tax deductible acceptable donation today@mormonmatters.org Music for this podcast was brought to you by Brittany and Clayton Pixton. The Mormon Matters logo was generously provided by studiocase.com thank you for listening. Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive do this and joy your hearts will swell. All is well

Brian Dalton [01:43:11] all is well.

Dan Wotherspoon [01:43:16] Do this and joy your hearts will

Brian Dalton [01:43:20] swell

Dan Wotherspoon [01:43:22] all is well all is well all is well

Brian Dalton [01:43:32] all is well

Dan Wotherspoon [01:43:35] all is well well

Brian Dalton [01:43:40] all is well.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.