All I will say for now as a follow-up to my last post is that Amber did respond to my text, and she's said a lot of wise and beautiful things that I agree with wholeheartedly, and I'm glad I didn't write her off as insane just because her beliefs seem out there and she drugged me without my consent. The values and principles by which she lives are more important than whether alchemy is real, and she's someone I can learn from and be inspired by. I'm sure I was meant to meet her. I hope her reach and influence grow.

I don't consider myself a very materialistic person - I don't buy a lot of non-essential stuff or yearn to possess a lot of non-essential stuff - but once I own something, I hate to get rid of it, even if the odds of me ever using it again (or maybe at all) are next to zero. When I moved out of my last place, I took all the kitchen stuff that previous occupants had left behind, and in six months, I've used none of it, but I still had to take it with me when I moved again on Friday. It was embarrassing and frustrating to make the people helping me carry so many boxes. Moving was miserable. On the one hand, I still don't own half as much stuff as my parents or grandparents did at my age, and it's unfair that I should have to limit myself more just because I'll probably continue to move for the rest of my life because I'll never be able to own a house because their generations raped mine. On the other hand, it's good to practice detachment because I'll lose everything I own when I die anyway. I'm going to get rid of a lot of this crap if it kills me.

My new location really sucks from a public transportation standpoint and a being close to protests in the city standpoint, and I have to share it with roommates, and the private bathroom I inherited was so gross that I had to remind myself it doesn't matter because I'll die someday. On the other hand, I no longer live next to a highway and a construction site, I have a yard, I can see stars at night, I don't have to pay to do laundry, and rent is hundreds of dollars cheaper. I'm living in a basement again, but a much larger and better furnished one than where I started when I moved to Salt Lake County. And there's a hot tub, which I don't anticipate using current conditions improve. My roommates are chill. One of them has a girlfriend, apparently, so I have to wear clothes in case she comes over. She yelled at me last night when she saw me stargazing in the backyard and got scared, and I'm not going to let her hear the end of that.

I think everyone in the house except me is Mormon. When I met the friend who owns it fifteen years ago in Logan, he was an agnostic atheist, having deconverted from Hinduism after he realized his religion was just as ridiculous as Mormonism. He was one of those people who respected my honesty and intelligence despite our differing views on that subject and made it all the more embarrassing for me to decide I was wrong after all. But he went to church for social reasons for a long time, and he prayed sometimes in case something ever happened, and he eventually came to believe that God wanted him to get baptized. He supports gay rights, or at least he used to, and he agrees with me now that most of the problems in Mormon history and theology don't have good answers, but he decided that was his path, and he seems really into it now. Life is funny. Yesterday I heard him upstairs with some people, and he said something about "fourteen-year-olds back then" and then they were clearly talking about marriage and the church, so I really hope he wasn't straight-up trying to justify Joseph Smith preying on Helen Mar Kimball. He's listened to enough Mormon Stories podcasts to know better.

I may actually go to church activities with him now that I'm farther away from my protesting peeps. I don't know if he's in a mid-singles ward, or if they don't care about the ages here, or what. They raised the upper age limit of Young Single Adult wards to 35 right at the time that I stopped going to church activities and would have aged out anyway, and like all the other consolidations the church has done recently, that's not a sign of growth or prosperity. I'm sure it's also not great for the 18-year-old women. The last time I went inside a Mormon church building was for my niece's baby blessing, and at that time, I got a legitimate warm and loving vibe from the community, but the talks and the lesson were so very boring. I mean, in Elder's Quorum, the guy passed around Hershey's Kisses and asked us each to say something that makes us feel loved, and I liked that part, but the rest of the lesson was literally listening to a General Conference talk, which is marginally more interesting than listening to someone read the majority of a General Conference talk in a monotone voice in sacrament meeting. Anyway, I won't go to the meetings because I don't want anyone to think I'm okay with the church's money hoarding, sex abuse cover-ups, or treatment of women and queer people, but activities, sure.

Even though women recently started leaving Mormonism at a higher rate than men for the first time, there will, no doubt, be more unmarried non-lesbian women at these activities than I've grown accustomed to hanging out with. Maybe what I need to do is find a nice Mormon girl and deconvert her. Kidding, kidding. Only the Holy Ghost can deconvert people. By "the Holy Ghost" I mean Satan, since he's apparently the one who deceives people out of Mormonism by inspiring its leaders to say and do such stupid shit that annihilates their credibility.

A week ago, I found the second shield beetle that had gotten through my poorly sealed window. Today, I've found eight. I am no longer willing to take time out of my day to catch and release them. Now they die. Sorry. I wish I didn't have to come to this. If I can find their exact entry points or a way to repel them, I'll do that. Sometimes I see them on the outside of my window and pound on it to scare them away before they get in.

At least I never burned grasshoppers to death for fun. How's that for a transition? That's how Kyle McKay, the official LDS Church "Historian" - I use scare quotes because, like most LDS Church leaders, his background is in business and law - recently opened his remarks at a stake conference in Oklahoma. He said that being under the bright lights with his glasses was like the "revenge of the grasshoppers" that he killed as a kid. Pretty messed up, but kids will be kids, I guess.

Then he called "This Little Light of Mine," which was recently added to the Mormon repertoire after decades of singing boring white Protestant hymns with as little enthusiasm as possible, "a song where white people try to sing like black people." If he'd stopped there, I wouldn't have seen a problem. Jokes about cultural differences are not inherently racist, and if anything, given the aforementioned context, this one sounds to me like it's poking fun at white people. But then he gave his impression of a white person singing like a black person and made up a whole conversation that didn't happen. "​I wanted to turn to him and say, 'You know you’re white. And he would say, 'No, I'm an African slave, is what I am, and I'm singing 'Swanee River.'" In case you're unaware, "Swanee River" is a racist minstrel song. I have no idea why he thought this imaginary conversation needed to be shared. He seemed to be under the influence of something, and I don't mean the Holy Ghost.

I have nothing personal against McKay, whom I heard from at an institute devotional before he was important and remember liking just fine. I appreciate his apology and don't think this incident makes him a bad person, but I think it demonstrates loud and clear that Mormon leaders are out of touch and uninspired - not, despite the straw man apologists will want to apply, because I expect them to be perfect, but because anyone actually speaking for God in the year 2026 would know better than to preface his remarks by joking about a racist song that most people born after the 1950s have probably never heard of. That is absolutely not an unreasonable standard to hold them to. This might be a good time to point out that McKay's primary qualification for Mormon leadership is being a former prophet's first cousin twice removed. His sole qualification for being a historian, meanwhile, is his loyalty to the LDS Church's narrative. If you think that's not a real qualification for being a historian, you're so right. This shows in a talk he gave in 2023 called "A Sure and Certain Foundation," which, while not racist, was pretty awful.

According to McKay, the abundance and strength of evidence and arguments against the LDS Church just prove that it's true. I'm not exaggerating.

​"As you increase your efforts to increase your testimony, you are likely to be confronted with reasons to doubt. President Nelson cautioned, 'Don’t pollute [your testimony] with false philosophies of unbelieving men and women.' Please hear me and understand: there will always be some reason or another to doubt the truthfulness of this church and gospel. There are arguments and evidence supporting the proposition that there is no God, that Jesus was just a good philosopher-teacher, that Joseph Smith was simply a charismatic storyteller and that this church and gospel are not true. This evidence, these arguments, are on some level appealing and believable, for there are many who believe them....

"In short, agency - that is, our ability, our responsibility, to choose for ourselves - is essential in all things, including and beginning with belief. In order to preserve our agency in the matter of belief, there must be opposites from which to choose - reasons to believe and reasons to doubt. God does not give us doubts, nor is He the author of error, but He allows them because it is absolutely critical that you and I choose for ourselves to believe or not to believe. There will never come a time, at least pre-Millennium, when God removes all reason to doubt, for to do so would be to remove all agency in the matter of belief.

"Now, I want to be clear - by acknowledging the existence of reasons to doubt, I am not legitimizing them, and I am certainly not advocating or excusing doubt itself. Jesus said, 'Doubt not.' In the face of reasons to doubt, doubt not.

"And what? Did you think Satan would throw up flimsy, easily dismissible reasons to doubt? No! They will be enticing and flattering. If the prince of darkness can transform himself into an angel of light, then surely he can put forth ideas and arguments that appear enlightened."

See, I told you I wasn't exaggerating. I hope you realize that any religion could make this same rebuttal to its critics with equal validity - Catholicism, Islam, Scientology, Heaven's Gate, etc. And I think it's so funny how Satan gets all the credit for deceiving people and destroying their testimonies when he has so much help from Mormon leaders themselves. Is Satan the one who inspired Brigham Young to undermine confidence in his prophetic authority by declaring on multiple occasions that mixed-race couples and their children should be put to death? But of course, following the party line, McKay grouped every uninspired or downright awful Mormon leaders have said or done under "mistakes" and "errors" and makes critics out to be the unreasonable ones for expecting them to be "perfect." He even turned the accusation around:

"And what about you? If the truthfulness of this Church or the truthfulness of or your beliefs were judged by your errors, would anyone ever believe what you believe? Would there have been fewer mistakes, fewer messes, if God had only restored His Church and gospel through you?"

Yes, I answer without hesitation, pausing only to add the caveat that this is entirely hypothetical because the "restoration" is a fiction to begin with. Like many, many people who aren't Joseph Smith, I've managed not to be a serial adulterer and sexual predator despite my imperfections. I'm aware that in real life, people might already be less inclined to listen to the spiritual wisdom I have to share because I don't always live by it, and that's too bad, but I've never claimed to speak for God, whether I'm sharing wisdom or being an asshole. My mistakes and messes reflect on me. Kyle McKay's racist flub reflects on God because he was speaking in his official capacity and was supposed to have the Holy Ghost telling him what to say, which he invoked right before he started talking about the grasshoppers. Of course, everyone has off days, and this wasn't so bad that I would consider it a smoking gun against the LDS Church on its own. It's just part of a long-term pattern, with countless much more concerning examples, of these men not having the inspiration they claim.

"Sometimes, in studying the Book of Mormon or presenting it to others, we are tempted to bypass its primary purpose and jump straight to the collateral conclusion that if the Book of Mormon is true, Joseph Smith is a prophet and this is God’s church."

Off-topic, but I noticed this while I was skimming and wanted to comment because excuse me, this is exactly what the LDS Church taught us to do and what it teaches missionaries to teach prospective converts to do. Literally this exact line of reasoning is spelled out in Preach My Gospel. I'm so tired of rank-and-file Mormons being thrown under the bus for issues that come from the top. Of course, when the church tells us that David Whitmer testified of the Book of Mormon to the end of his life, it doesn't mention that he also said Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet, polygamy was an abomination, and the LDS Church was in apostasy. Anyway, McKay's point here was to suggest that we "read the book for its primary purpose - to convince the people of this earth that Jesus is the Christ." He went on,

"When you ask God, the Eternal Father, if these things are true - if Jesus is the Christ, if this is His gospel - it is essential that you ask in faith. Asking, and for that matter, reading from a position of doubt or skepticism will not summon a response from Heaven. 'Prove-it-to-me' prayers are seldom answered, and if they are, it is usually to the condemnation, even destruction, of the one demanding proof. Think Korihor and Sherem, for example. Asking in faith - even a particle of faith - implies that you at least have a desire to believe. Lead with this desire and 'let [it] work in you.'

"Asking in faith also means that you believe God will answer your prayers and give you the knowledge you desire. This faith is often demonstrated by what you do after you ask. Waiting patiently, unwaveringly for the witness you desire is part of asking in faith."

This is literally the definition of confirmation bias. Of course, McKay didn't come up with it on his own. Mormon epistemology is founded on confirmation bias.

"Brothers and sisters, I hope you realize that having perplexing questions that arise from reasons to doubt is not a problem. But please understand, finding answers to these perplexing questions ultimately is not the solution. The solution is a sure and certain foundation whereon if you build, you cannot fall. That foundation is Jesus Christ and His gospel, the fullness of which is found and taught in this Church."

Begging the question here - I mean actually begging the question, not the incorrect way everyone uses that term now. We must start with the conclusion that the fullness of Jesus Christ's gospel is found and taught in the LDS Church, and anything that gives us cause to doubt that conclusion, like whether the leaders of the LDS Church act anything like Jesus Christ would tell them to act if he were talking to them, is preemptively deemed irrelevant. Again, any religion could defend its truth claims with a similar fallacy. This is something I've noticed a lot lately. When I was a kid, prophets were supposed to direct us to Jesus, but now they cause so many problems for belief that we're told to just ignore them and focus on Jesus. My mom told me (back when I still spoke to her), "I made my covenants with God, not Spencer W. Kimball or Brigham Young." And where, pray tell, does she think everything she believes about covenants and God came from?

And oh, I didn't even realize this. McKay closed this talk with the story of Jane Elizabeth Manning maintaining her testimony of the LDS Church despite its policy that barred her from the temple because of the color of her skin, and the refusal of multiple prophets to make an exception for her.

"Her request was not granted. The Church President to whom she petitioned was John Taylor. He who once withstood what might have been his compelling reason to doubt now became part of what might have been Jane Manning’s compelling reason to doubt. Jane made similar petitions to Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith, who similarly upheld the race restrictions at the time. It would have been easy and understandable for Jane to pack it in, shut it down, and walk away. But she didn’t. Why? Because because her foundation was sure and certain in the truths that she had learned."

Very inspirational. Of course, like the other white Mormon leaders who use Jane's story as propaganda, he didn't say the policy was racist or wrong, he didn't mention that Joseph F. Smith eventually did compromise by having Jane sealed to Joseph Smith as a "Servitor" with a white woman as proxy, and he didn't mention that her surviving children left the church. Maybe if he'd ever really grappled with the LDS Church's treatment of black people instead of assuring himself that it was fine because a very small number of them believed in it anyway, he wouldn't have been so out of touch with reality that he thought his "Swanee River" joke would go over well. How's that for continuity?

I, my roommate, and our landlord all spent Christmas at home alone, but at least I did fun things while my landlord decided it was a good day to paint the empty rooms and wash his car. I watched a 1933 short film called The Mascot, which is a live-action fever dream version of Toy Story. It follows a toy puppy on an adventure to get an orange for a little blind girl. It's not a cute children's film, though, because one of the toys gets his head run over by a car and the others spend an inordinate amount of time in hell with Satan and various monsters for no adequately explained reason. Artists, am I right? I loved it, though. The stop-motion effects look phenomenal, and in shots where the toys interact with the real world, they're integrated flawlessly. It's sure to become a Christmas classic in my household.

I'm thinking about this part of the Christmas story:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.
But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. (Matthew 1:18-20)

When I heard this part of the story at church as a kid, this is how I understood it: "Joseph didn't want to marry Mary, but an angel told him he had to."

I reminisce about this amusing anecdote because now my former church is teaching children, "Joseph [Smith] didn't want to marry thirty women and teenage girls, but an angel told him he had to." (paraphrased) That narrative sounds absolutely deranged to everyone else in the world, but it's what they're going with. Joseph, the new illustrated scripture story on the church's website would have us believe, was like, "Oh no, God, please don't make me cheat on my legal wife with all these other women and teenage girls. Anything but that, please. This is the hardest thing ever. It's so hard. It's really hard. I really, really, really don't want to do it, but I will be obedient because sometimes God tells us to do hard things. Did I mention that it's hard?" Yes, the captions use the word "hard" so many times that it seems intentional. And the images depict beds more often than necessary. What they don't depict is multiple wives. Somehow the images remain almost entirely focused on men and how hard they were finding polygamy.

You might think I'd be glad that the church is teaching children about Joseph's polygamy. It never taught me about Joseph's polygamy. I knew about Brigham Young's polygamy through cultural osmosis, but all I ever heard regarding Joseph was Emma this, Emma that. I learned the truth from a secular magazine article when I was seventeen. I thought it was a mistake, but my parents said it was true, so they'd also known about this and never told me, which kind of pissed me off. (My mom hates polygamy so much that she's said she won't discuss or think about it at all, but why she doesn't see that discomfort as a colossal red flag about the religion she belongs to and the god she worships is beyond me.) The church is now being a little more honest because the internet has given it no alternative, but "a little" are the key words here. Its story for children leaves out literally all the actual details of how Joseph practiced polygamy because it's almost impossible to learn about those without recognizing him as a sexual predator. For example, it mentions that sometimes "Emma did not want Joseph to marry other women" and leaves it at that. It doesn't mention that he did it behind her back anyway and told her in a "revelation" that Jesus would destroy her if she didn't quit complaining. So no, I'm not glad that the church is still lying to children.

Rebecca Biblioteca from Mormonish podcast threw together some AI pictures to fill in the gaps in the church's illustrated scripture story. (She loves making AI art. I know that makes her evil in some people's eyes. Artists, am I right?) A lot of people have now gotten hers mixed up with the real ones. They're all based on documented historical facts that the church won't tell children. Well, most of them. The first one is bullshit, but it is a documented manipulation tactic that Joseph used on a least a couple of women.

The other problem with this dishonest indoctrination is that the church is making it much easier for child predators, of which it has no shortage, to copy Joseph's manipulation tactics. "Sometimes God tells us to do hard things," a priesthood leader might tell a child. "Sometimes God tells us to do things that make us feel yucky. Sometimes God tells us to keep secrets." I don't think this is intentional, of course. I think the leaders of the church and the people who design its curricula are just very out of touch with how the real world works and how normal people think. Of course, the part where the church's lawyers protect the church's child predators and fight against their victims in court is always intentional.

Mormon polygamy is weird, but it isn't bad because it's weird, it's bad because it's manipulative, predatory, abusive, and degrading to women and girls. It's indefensible as a divine practice, and the sooner the church gets a clue about that, the better. I don't see that happening for several years, but I think it's inevitable. Just like the church had no choice but to start talking about it in the first place, I think it will have no choice but to come around to the position of Patrick Mason, one of its own leading faithful scholars and apologists, who said that Joseph Smith's polygamy looks like sin and that defending it is like putting lipstick on a pig.

First, indulge me while I pat myself on the back.

This new record has been set in large part thanks to my page about Ezra Taft Benson's 1987 talk "To the Mothers in Zion," which a lot of people looked up to verify that the LDS Church's general Relief Society president, Camille Johnson, disregarded the prophet's counsel in the 1980s and is now being celebrated by the church for it. The gaslighting is rather tedious. I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.

Twitter is now completely X, which is a really cool name if you're in middle school. I'll probably just keep calling it Twitter to show my contempt for its owner. It's a dumpster fire of bullying and hate speech, and it deserves to lose all its advertising sponsors, but I keep using it because I have the unfortunate moral failing of really enjoying heated arguments with bad people. I've had a few more civil debates with okay people, but they didn't give me the same thrill. I was going to share several of the stupid LDS-adjacent Tweets that I saw this week, but as this topic probably interests no one as much as me, it isn't worth the effort. I'll just share one. I was one of the first people who saw it, and I couldn't believe my eyes. I gladly helped make it go viral-ish.

It's public knowledge that this man has a traumatic brain injury, and it's very obvious from his posts that he's delusional. I've tried to tell him that a few times. I know there's not a nice way to tell someone that they're delusional, but I tried not to be a jerk about it, and I hoped he could make the connection since he's aware that he has a traumatic brain injury. But no. Given the circumstances, I don't think he's guilty of the same intentional evil as most of his right-wing Mormon buddies, and I want to be sympathetic to him, but he's such an insufferable ass that it's impossible.

Most Mormons are, of course, as shocked and horrified by this man's belief as I was. Even on Twitter, many decent Mormons told him he was wrong. (The horrible ones were strangely quiet.) He claimed that only apostates and "progmos" were telling him he was wrong, and he doubled down.

So this is the nonsense of a mentally ill man who does not accurately represent what most Mormons believe. Nonetheless, I have no hesitation in using it to humiliate the LDS Church, because it is what the Book of Mormon teaches. It's what I was taught as a kid. It wasn't made into a big deal, and I didn't give it much thought, and I didn't realize how horrifically racist it is until I was in college - and then only because I stumbled, quite by accident, upon an article by Mormon apologists arguing that the skin color in the Book of Mormon is metaphorical. They presented a surprisingly sophisticated argument, and it persuaded me for several years. But it makes no sense in the obvious nineteenth-century cultural context of the book's origin, it isn't what Mormon leaders taught for most of their history, it isn't what was depicted in decades of visual media based on the Book of Mormon, and I'm pretty sure that even today it isn't a mainstream Mormon belief. I suspect that most Mormons, like me, honestly just don't think about this part of the book very much. I bet a substantial number of them don't even know about it because they've never read the whole book. One apologist got raked over the coals recently for suggesting that the skins in the book were the animal skins that people wore, and that's what Mr. Plumb is mocking in his Tweet. Ironically, he's correct about it being ridiculous.

Here's Spencer W. Kimball, a Mormon prophet, seer, and revelator, teaching the same thing in General Conference that this delusional man believes, because it's what the Book of Mormon says:

This was in 1960. Notwithstanding the widespread virulent racism that existed in 1960, normal people had at least figured out by then that skin color was not caused by curses from God. But Kimball also taught that masturbation led to homosexuality and women having equal rights led to divorce, so I'm not positive that he wasn't delusional too.

Kimball does deserve some credit for lifting the LDS Church's racist ban against full participation by members of African descent. Here's prophet, seer and revelator LeGrand Richards in an interview with Reverend Wesley Walters a couple of months later. Walters asked him if Mormons still believed that Black people were less valiant in the previous life. Richards said,

That was in 1978, in case anyone forgot. Mormon leaders don't say that stuff anymore, but I have yet to hear any of them endorse the "it's metaphorical" hypothesis.

The obvious nineteenth-century cultural context of the Book of Mormon's teachings about skin color is the racist Mound Builder myth. Many European settlers believed that the Native Americans were too primitive to have built the mounds and earthworks that dotted North America, so they speculated that those things had been built by an earlier race of light-skinned people before the darker-skinned people wiped them out. Many European settlers, without the benefit of modern anthropology or DNA science, also believed that the Native Americans were descended from Israelites. Lo and behold, both of those ideas became essential to the narrative of the Book of Mormon, and since neither of those ideas has the benefit of being true, it strains credulity to regard that as a coincidence. The argument that the skin color is metaphorical relies on the book coming out of an ancient Hebrew context without the modern concept of race, but it didn't. It so obviously didn't.

But that's not the worst part of the Book of Mormon's racism. The worst part of the Book of Mormon's racism is its assertion that the Native Americans deserved to be displaced and decimated by the Europeans because their ancestors abandoned God. And this is an absolutely core part of the narrative that can't be downplayed as "metaphorical." Over 20 times the book paraphrases the teaching, "Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land; but inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments ye shall be cut off from my presence." Even the chorus of the children's song "Book of Mormon Stories" (which has its own racism problem) repeats "Given this land, if they lived, rye-chus-lee." (emphasis in original) Few things could make it more obvious that the book was written by a man of European descent putting God's stamp of approval on his ethnocentric worldview. But this is an abhorrent thing to teach anyone, especially the descendants of the people who were displaced and decimated.

So again, I have no moral qualms about using Mr. Plumb's deranged Tweet to humiliate the LDS Church, because he's a more solid believer in its foundational text than its own current leaders are. I don't doubt that he causes more problems for them by saying the quiet parts out loud than I do by criticizing them on my blog. But if you're struggling with how to continue believing in the Book of Mormon as a divinely inspired ancient text despite its blatant nineteenth-century racism, don't worry, he has a solution for that too.

The LDS missionaries stopped by my apartment the other night. They were the Chinese-speaking missionaries, the only ones who have ever stopped by my apartment, apparently because a couple years ago I had a Chinese neighbor who had joined the LDS Church. One was American and remembered me from the last time he knocked on my door. The other was from Hong Kong, hadn't yet mastered English, and didn't talk much. I told them I was no longer LDS, but I still let them come in and try to convince me to come back because I want them to have positive experiences on their missions. I have no animosity toward these kids doing what they believe is right, and I want everyone everywhere to be nice to them. I could have wiped the floor with them in a debate, but because I didn't want to send them into crippling existential crises, I was vague about my reasons for leaving and didn't push back much on the stuff they said. I especially didn't want to expose the Chinese guy to a bunch of problematic stuff that he'd probably never heard of due to having far LDS-adjacent fewer resources in his native language.

The American said he knows there are a lot of difficult issues in church history, and he named a few - the Book of Abraham translation, polygamy, and the priesthood ban. He probably learned about those things in seminary. I certainly didn't. When I was his age, the LDS Church was just barely starting to be more honest about its history as damage control after the skeletons in its closet were plastered all over the internet, which is how I had to learn about them. The seminary curriculum was dumbed down so much that even as an all-in gung-ho believer, I hated it and didn't finish. And, of course, even though this missionary knows these things, he sure isn't going to teach them to prospective converts. Anyway, I could have wiped the floor with him in a debate on any of these topics if I'd wanted to. I'm positive I know all the same apologetic arguments that he does. But we didn't go in that direction. He only lingered on the priesthood ban, mentioning that Joseph Smith gave the priesthood to Black men, and then that practice just stopped, and it's weird. I could have said that we know why it stopped, that it stopped because Joseph Smith's successor was virulently racist and enshrined his virulent racism in both church doctrine and policy, which really decimates the credibility of all LDS prophets, but I nodded politely instead. 

He asked what it would take for me to come back to the church. Again, I held back. Believing in the LDS Church again would be like putting all the toothpaste back in a tube. I would have to forget that I know it's not true. I would have to pretend I can't see Joseph Smith's nineteenth-century fingerprints all over the Book of Mormon, or his manipulative tactics to increase his authority, blame others for his prophetic failures, and persuade teenage girls to marry him. In short, I simply know too much to believe. But I didn't want to say something so invalidating. It's not polite. I told him I'd come back if I heard a voice or saw an angel. I said I know the church specifically tells us not to demand miraculous signs like that, but I don't trust "the Holy Ghost" anymore or believe that my spiritual feelings really mean what the church claims they mean, so I'm going to need something more. They read some scriptures. The Chinese guy talked about the importance of trusting God with my questions instead of people, and approaching them with a perspective of faith. I nodded politely instead of complaining about confirmation bias.

They asked about my views on God and Jesus. I said that I don't feel like God ever intervenes in my life, and I still pray every night, but I've given up on asking for anything because it's pointless. I said that I used to look back and feel like God had been guiding me through my life, but now I wonder if that's just because I'm a human and my brain has evolved to see patterns where there aren't any. I said that I think I have a pretty good life, but I'm not comfortable attributing that to blessings from God because what about the countless people with crappy lives? Does he love them less? The Chinese guy said it's important to keep the perspective of the premortal life and the next life, to remember that not all blessings come in this life. And you know what, that makes sense. I do believe there's a purpose to life and that whatever it is can only make sense if it starts before birth and goes beyond death. That's one thing I think Joseph Smith got right. I certainly don't believe the specific details taught by his church, though. And I don't think it's possible to know the details without dying. Maybe not even then.

The American encouraged me to pray and ask God if he loves me. Not if the LDS Church was true. I was glad that he wasn't really pushy about me coming back. He seemed to genuinely respect my personal journey and prioritize God's love over being in a specific church. He encouraged me to ask that and pay attention to whether I felt anything or to what happened the next day, and if I didn't notice anything, to be patient and not give up. I could have argued that in my view, if you have to keep praying and waiting until you feel something, you've probably just convinced yourself to feel it. But I didn't. And that night, I did ask, and I didn't feel anything, just like I knew I wouldn't. And the next day was a good day, but I wouldn't say anything special happened. Oh well. I certainly would like to believe that God loves everybody. I don't claim to know that he doesn't. I just don't see it. As the missionaries left, the American asked if I would like to go to church this Sunday, and I said I'm participating in the Unitarian Universalist church right now, and he said that was good and didn't press the issue.

Believing in the LDS Church again is out of the question, but here's the bare minimum that it would have to do in order for me to participate:

* End all policy restrictions on LGBT members.

* End all policy restrictions on women.

* Stop hoarding obscene wealth and start spending a lot more on humanitarian aid.

* Stop protecting sexual abusers and fighting against their victims in court.

* Stop lying about its history and finances.

* Stop worshiping the current prophet and pretending that every word out of his mouth comes from God.

* Apologize and make restitution for the harm it's caused to people of color, LGBT people, women, abuse victims, and apostates.

I have no doubt that all of these things will happen eventually, but probably not in my lifetime.