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.

I made a simple little YouTube ad for my book. In theory, I have a wider reach on YouTube than on any other platform, because I have 3.45K subscribers, mostly thanks to one music video I posted in 2015 that has over two million views. In practice, this video has gotten six views in six days. Yay, I love being me.

But I'm also friends with a host of a Star Wars podcast, and I arranged to exploit that for some free advertising under the rationale that my book drew lots of inspiration from Star Wars. I listened to this episode on mute because I want to support my friend but I'd rather slit my wrists than hear my own voice. This was my first time being interviewed about what I hope to leverage into a career, and I think I did pretty well right until the end. I've decided that from now on I'm not going to be apologetic or self-deprecating about the fact that I self-published. That was my choice, and I stand by it. I don't know how much rejection I would have experienced or how many changes the publisher would have wanted to make if I'd gone the traditional route, but the fact that I didn't is not a reflection on the quality of my writing. Also, at the end, I should have mentioned my Goodreads author page. I only mentioned my Amazon page and this website and said that should about cover it. My mind was racing with all my different social media profiles, and I thought I should keep it simple by not including them, and then I didn't mention the Goodreads author page because I haven't done anything with it, I have one follower (the podcast friend), and I don't have a strategy for using it to further my career. I should, though. But see, I'm learning already, and it's a very good sign that I don't hate everything about this interview.

A few days later, as it happens, another friend sought out people to participate in a podcast that she's making for a college class. The topic is "life lessons you wish you had learned sooner." I'm not sure if I'll do it or not, because the biggest life lesson I wish I had learned sooner, besides the generic and boring ones, is one that she, a Mormon, wouldn't want to hear. The biggest life lesson I wish I had learned sooner is this: Feelings are not a reliable method of evaluating truth. I've only learned this in the last couple of years. My parents and everyone in the LDS Church taught me from a young age to base my worldview in large part on "spiritual witnesses" that are actually just normal human emotions. As an adult, I thought I was so open-minded and well-rounded because I accepted spiritual methods of evaluating certain kinds of truth in addition to empirical methods for evaluating other kinds of truth. But this sandy foundation, and my desperate wholehearted efforts to follow God's direction for my life, eventually brought me a world of pain and disillusionment. Pleasant feelings are not the Holy Ghost. Unpleasant feelings are not Satan. This is so obvious now. I'm pretty pissed off that I was indoctrinated to think that way. I try not to be pissed off at any specific person who indoctrinated me, because I know they all meant well.

There was a very specific point in my life, age seventeen, where I chose to continue believing the church, despite all the evidence I'd stumbled upon that Joseph Smith was a fraud, because of the powerful "spiritual witness" I'd felt at EFY. It's hard to say I regret that as such. I don't regret moving to Utah, going to USU, or meeting many wonderful people and having many great experiences through the church. It's impossible to even say how my life would have turned out otherwise. But eventually, my fidelity to this decision - to God, I thought - drove me to twist myself into intellectual pretzels, put up with a lot of bullcrap that was so clearly wrong, and waste several years of my life defending and promoting a lie. I wish I had still come to Utah and gone to USU but left the LDS Church years earlier. And I hope to help others figure it out sooner than I did before they base their major life decisions on unreliable feelings, perhaps with less positive results. Think of all the women who gave up their dreams because their prophet told them to be stay-at-home moms, for example. Think of all the irrational things people may do because they think the Holy Ghost told them to. Someone posted this on reddit a few months ago. They filed it under Humor/Memes, but it's not funny, it's terrifying that children are being groomed to think this way. Or more precisely, to not think at all.

People in every religion appear to get the same "spiritual witnesses" that the LDS Church wants to monopolize, and I point this out at every opportunity. Mormons typically give me one of two responses. The first one is that of course all these people feel the Holy Ghost because all religions have some truth. But that still undermines the claim that Mormons' spiritual witnesses specifically prove that their religion is the most true. Mormons have no right to assert that their subjective personal feelings are more powerful or more authentic than everyone else's subjective personal feelings. This also fails to explain why "the Holy Ghost" bears witness of the truth of suicide cults, as attested by people who have been filmed bearing emotional testimonies a few days before they killed themselves because their prophet told them to. And when I bring that up, Mormons give their other response, which is that Satan deceived those people by mimicking the Holy Ghost - something that the LDS Church specifically taught me he couldn't do. My sister said that's why we have to evaluate religions by their fruits. I tried to explain that nobody in the world sees the LDS Church protecting child abusers or lying about its obscene wealth and thinks "Ah, this must be the true religion."

Someone posted this on reddit a few days ago. I can vouch that nothing in it is inaccurate. I was taught all of this in the LDS Church, and now, from the other side, the manipulation and circular reasoning are so obvious (without even getting into the fallacious claim that the church is automatically true if the Book of Mormon is true).

The LDS Church quite noticeably pulls this same bullcrap with tithing. If you pay it and good things happen, that proves tithing is a true principle and you should keep paying it. If you pay it and good things don't happen, that means you need to wait on the Lord's timing or you're just failing to notice the subtle ways he's blessing you, and tithing is still a true principle and you should keep paying it. There is no scenario in which the church will concede that the tithing promise has been falsified.

While I'm on the subject of the Book of Mormon, though, I want to address a couple of faith-promoting cliches that I saw all over Twitter when Mormons began studying it in their church curriculum this year. The people saying these things weren't the usual alt-right jerks that I interact with, so I left them alone unless they specifically invited feedback. But I can't stand the claim that Joseph Smith only had 85 days to translate the Book of Mormon and therefore it was miraculous. According to his own narrative, he had five and a half years between the time he first mentioned the golden plates and the time he started translating them. His mother later wrote of this period, "During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of travelings, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life among them." He even got a bit of a practice run when he dictated the original 116 pages and then didn't reproduce them after Martin Harris lost them, as he would have been able to do if he'd actually received them by revelation. And then he only needed to dictate for three to six hours a day to get the Book of Mormon finished in 85 days. Suddenly it's a little less miraculous.

I also saw a lot of assertions that the Book of Mormon has "held up to scrutiny" for almost two hundred years. That one just baffles me. Orthodox Mormons will continue to believe in it because of their "spiritual witness," not because of external evidence or internal consistency, regardless of what anyone says. Meanwhile, the people outside of the LDS Church and the tiny Mormon splinter groups who take it seriously as an ancient document can be counted on one hand. Virtually all scholars of anything regard it as an obvious work of nineteenth-century fiction. Even many Mormons regard it as a work of nineteenth-century fiction. I have no real idea, but I think it would be generous to estimate that 0.05% of people in the world believe the Book of Mormon is what Joseph Smith said it was. So why does that tiny fraction of a percent, whatever it happens to be exactly, get to decide that the book has "held up to scrutiny"? What does that even mean under these circumstances? Just that the book has continued to exist? That's a pretty low bar, and not miraculous by any stretch of the imagination. It's the same bar to which they hold the entire LDS Church now that its "miraculous" growth rate has been plummeting for three decades in a row.

So that's why I'm not sure if I'll appear on this other friend's podcast.

After getting the winter off to a dry start, we got a lot of snow in Logan last night. It's supposed to snow for most of this week and get very cold. I'm not a fan, but it will help with the drought. And at least we'll get a few more seconds of sunlight every day. January is an endurance test.

I'd like to pass along a couple of articles that I read after someone else passed along this week. First, from Scientific American, Can God Be Proved Mathematically? I almost didn't bother to read it because I care a lot less about whether God exists than I used to. I reached the conclusion a while ago that the universe probably does depend on a higher power that most of us call God for its existence, but I see little evidence that this power is intervening in my life or in world affairs, so whether it merely ignores my prayers or doesn't exist at all makes little difference to me. I still pray every night, but mostly just as a cathartic ritual to talk about my life. I rarely waste my breath asking for things anymore. So I'm far more concerned about what happens after I die, and I know that if consciousness continues, it isn't magic. It follows laws just like the rest of the universe. So if the universe doesn't need God in order to exist, neither does eternal life or reincarnation or whatever. Spoiler alert for the article: some mathematical arguments create a rational foundation for smart people to believe in God, but they don't definitively prove his existence to the satisfaction of other smart people. You probably could have guessed that.

The person who passed these articles along was a Mormon. I didn't argue with him because he wasn't being a jackass, and I try not to argue with people just for the sake of tearing down their beliefs if they're not being jackasses. But here in my own space I'd just like to mention that the God postulated by philosophy and mathematics is not the deity that Mormons believe in. It's not an exalted man with a wife (or wives) whom we're not supposed to talk about or pray to. It's not an object among all the other objects in the universe, located in one physical place. It's an entirely different class of entity, one that contains the cause of its own existence and which, therefore, is uniquely capable of being the cause for everything else's existence. And it's everywhere, not just in the sense that Mormons say God's knowledge and influence are everywhere, but literally everywhere in equal measures at all times. The same arguments that make this God's existence plausible have the opposite effect on the Mormon God, and most Mormons probably don't recognize that because they just say "God" without worrying about the significant differences between how they and other theists define that term.

Half of that article is devoted to Kurt Gödel's mathematical proof, the most recent and sophisticated, and then the whole other article is about him. From aeon, We'll Meet Again discusses the arguments that Gödel laid out for his private belief in an afterlife in four letters to his mother. Here he became more philosophical than mathematical. He argued, in summary, that if the world is rationally organized, as we have reason to believe it is for the simple reason that science works, then our existence must continue after death to rectify the irrationality of our miserable lives and wasted potential. He cited the human capacity for learning as the purpose of this afterlife. "In particular," he wrote, "one must imagine that the ‘learning’ occurs in great part first in the next world, namely, in that we remember our experiences from this world and come to understand them really for the first time, so that our this-worldly experiences are - so to speak - only the raw material for learning." That certainly resonates with Mormon beliefs in broad strokes, though Gödel didn't say anything about making spirit babies with multiple wives for eternity. Again, this argument won't convince a determined skeptic, but Gödel's intellect and education ought to have humbled the guy in the comments section who assumed that he'd somehow never considered entropy in his calculations.

I only want to touch on one comment from a reader who, after agreeing with Gödel's arguments elsewhere that pure materialism doesn't hold up under logical scrutiny, added, "OTOH, his arguments about intrinsic meaningfulness and purpose sound downright medieval. Darwin showed clearly enough that everything we know as purpose can arise from blind evolution. And we’ve had a century to get used to the idea that our senses of meaning and purpose are not invalidated by their emergent nature. There is no need to posit a cosmic source to validate our feeling them." When I read the word "medieval" I flashed back to what David Bently Hart wrote in The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. He said that different philosophical worldviews never become outdated, just unfashionable. (Some would say that's why philosophy is useless.) Aristotle taught about four different kinds of causes: material (what is it made of), formal (what is its form), efficient (what makes it happen), and final (what is its purpose). These kinds are not exclusive. In the Aristotelian worldview, there's no reason why Darwinian evolution and a cosmic source can't both be causes of our sense of meaning and purpose. I think the former would be the efficient cause and the latter would be the final cause. This view hasn't been disproven, nor can it be; it just isn't fashionable right now because people embrace pure materialism instead.

As I read this article, I got a warm, peaceful feeling. According to my Mormon indoctrination, that was the Holy Ghost testifying that Gödel's beliefs were true. But now I know that it was just me testifying that I want them to be true. It's very difficult to keep personal biases out of such things when most of us are deeply programmed to not want our consciousness to be annihilated. But on the other hand, my pessimistic fear that existence is entirely meaningless, unfair, and temporary after all is a bias that might be just as powerful in the opposite direction. I'm pretty confident that there's an afterlife. I'll never again say that I know because I won't know until I'm dead, and then if I'm wrong, I still won't. But my months of existential terror are over for now, I think.

In the week since posting just a couple of things about the LDS Church's General Conference, I've become aware of church president Russell Nelson's closing talk, and like those other things, it pissed me off, and I didn't have much else in mind to write about this week. I'm not criticizing his remarks just for the sake of being negative or disrepecting my friends and family members who believe he's a prophet, but because I sincerely believe that these remarks and others like them are toxic and manipulative, and that's a lot easier to recognize from the outside and I wish I had been able to recognize it a lot sooner. So without further ado:

"​Here is the great news of God’s plan: the very things that will make your mortal life the best it can be are exactly the same things that will make your life throughout all eternity the best it can be!...

"The Lord has clearly taught that only men and women who are sealed as husband and wife in the temple, and who keep their covenants, will be together throughout the eternities."

These quotes are a few paragraphs apart, but I juxtaposed them to highlight the absurdity of the first one. According to the church's teachings, in order to qualify for the eternities, gay people need to either marry someone of the opposite sex whom they aren't attracted to or remain alone and celibate until they die, at which time God will presumably fix them and let them marry someone of the opposite sex. Both of these options demonstrably make most gay people miserable, even suicidal. They do not make mortal life the best it can be. But I don't think Nelson is being disingenuous here, just thoughtless.

"​Thus, if we unwisely choose to live telestial laws now, we are choosing to be resurrected with a telestial body. We are choosing not to live with our families forever."

The mention of telestial bodies reminded those who are familiar with obscure historical Mormon weirdness of Joseph Fielding Smith's assertion in the January 1962 Improvement Era that men and women who go to the telestial kingdom will probably lose their genitals to prevent them from having sex in defiance of God's eternal marriage requirement. "Is not the sectarian world justified in their doctrine generally proclaimed, that after the resurrection there will be neither male nor female sex? It is a logical conclusion for them to reach and apparently is in full harmony with what the Lord has revealed regarding the kingdoms into which evidently the vast majority of mankind is likely to go." Because of this hypothesis, the phrase "TK Smoothie" has entered the ex-Mormon lexicon.

"​So, my dear brothers and sisters, how and where and with whom do you want to live forever? You get to choose."

I certainly don't want to live with the LDS version of God for any length of time.

"As you think celestial, you will find yourself avoiding anything that robs you of your agency. Any addiction - be it gaming, gambling, debt, drugs, alcohol, anger, pornography, sex, or even food - offends God. Why? Because your obsession becomes your god. You look to it rather than to Him for solace."

I wonder how many eating disorders this quote exacerbated. I wonder how many addicts now hate themselves even more. I wonder why God is offended by so many things. Maybe he should have listened to David A. Bednar, who taught, "To be offended is a choice we make; it is not a condition inflicted or imposed upon us by someone or something else."

"​When someone you love attacks truth, think celestial, and don’t question your testimony. The Apostle Paul prophesied that 'in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.'

"There is no end to the adversary’s deceptions. Please be prepared. Never take counsel from those who do not believe. Seek guidance from voices you can trust - from prophets, seers, and revelators and from the whisperings of the Holy Ghost, who 'will show unto you all things what ye should do.' Please do the spiritual work to increase your capacity to receive personal revelation."

So this is the part that I really and truly hate. For the sake of civility and precision, I've tried to refrain from calling the LDS Church a "cult," but quotes like this make it really hard. Anyone not already indoctrinated into the church would see it as a massive red flag. If you went to buy some kind of expensive product, and the company told you to disregard all the negative reviews and lawsuits because those people are deceived by Satan, you would run the other way. If you knew that the directors of the company had made several grievious errors of judgment that called their competence into question and been caught in multiple lies and scandals, and instead of apologizing or making restitution of any kind they just acted like that didn't happen and told you to trust them anyway, you would run even faster. Russell Nelson, with the rest of the First Presidency, knew about and approved the church's dishonest and illegal behavior that got it in trouble with the Securities Exchange Commission earlier this year. He's also misrepresented or stretched the truth a few times in his public utterances.

Reducing arguments against the LDS Church's truth claims to "the adversary's deceptions" is especially ludicrous to me because the most damning ones are literally just quotes from its own "prophets, seers, and revelators" that we're supposed to trust. Is the adversary the one who inspires them to say those things then? Is the adversary the one who inspired Brigham Young to say on multiple occasions that Black people were cursed by God and unfit to hold political or eclessiastical power, that mixed race couples and their children should be put to death, that Adam was God, and that polygamy was the true order of marriage and a requirement for the celestial kingdom? If God's prophet can't tell the difference between God's voice and Satan's, he's not very trustworthy, even if he's honest. And I want to give Russell Nelson and the other LDS Church leaders the benefit of the doubt that they really believe in it, but now it sure seems like he's aware that it can't hold up under scrutiny. If it could, it would welcome criticism from all sides. This quote is a far cry from J. Reuben Clark saying, "If we have truth truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed." (Though that quote was actually a bluff, because before he made it, Clark had abandoned his intellectual pursuits after they almost turned him into an atheist.)

As far as the Holy Ghost, the jury's still out on that as far as I'm concerned. I want to believe that God will direct my life. There have been times when I believed that God directed my life. I now know, however, that people in every religion, including suicide cults, receive "spiritual witnesses" of the correctness of their religion that, to an outside observer, look essentially the same. And I've learned for myself that feelings are not a reliable guide to truth. Russell Nelson isn't a prophet just because some people get powerful emotions when he speaks. He would be a prophet if he ever did anything prophetic.