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.

Saturday was one year since the Islamic Republic murdered Mahsa Amini for not wearing a hijab, sparking protests throughout Iran. After a few months, the Western media largely ignored these protests or straight-up lied that they were basically over, but the truth is that they aren't going to stop until the Islamic Republic is dead. The Islamic Republic has passed the point of no return. It's lost its legitimacy, it's become desperate, and its collapse is a matter of when, not if. The sooner the better, of course. The US and the EU need to hasten that day by growing some spines and treating it like the global pariah that it deserves to be. Down with all dictatorships, down with all theocracies, down with all religious extremism, and down with all misogyny and other forms of bigotry, no matter how much they wrap themselves up in the supposed respectability of faith.

Today I went for a hike in Tony's Grove with members of the local Unitarian Universalist congregation and three dogs. I was the youngest human there by a wide margin. The next youngest human was a mother of adults and teenagers, and everyone else had white hair, or in one case would have had white hair if she hadn't dyed it purplish red. I didn't remember where Tony's Grove was and I didn't realize the drive and the hike combined would total four and a half hours, but I'm not mad. Just tired. The temperature was perfect and the views were gorgeous. Susanne Janecke, a geologist from USU, told us about the caves and the rocks. Supposedly some of the latter were shaped by the ocean before life existed on land. I'll take her word for it. I felt, as I often do these days, insignificant against the scope of this planet's history, and since we'd just had a presentation on climate change by USU hydrologist Patrick Belmont earlier that day, I thought about the possibility that my entire species might not be here much longer, and I wondered why we evolved to be so stupid and whether there's any real purpose to the suffering we've inflicted on ourselves and our home. But mostly I just appreciated the views.

The bus that picked me up from Green Canyon High School was moving through the final crosswalk before the transit center, already late, when one of Utah's special drivers tried to turn in front of it and forced the driver to slam on the brakes, sending my phone through the air. I took the Lord's name in vain and extended my middle finger toward her, but she probably didn't notice. Then I went to pick up my phone, but it wasn't on the floor. It wasn't on a seat. It wasn't anywhere. The bus pulled in, everyone else got off, and I kept looking back and forth and over and under and behind with no success. I knew my phone was still on the bus because it was still broadcasting music into my headphones. I told the driver what had happened, and then to my surprise, a transit center employee came on and looked for it too. We were already late, and I knew the other passengers must hate me, and I couldn't blame them. But it wasn't my fault, it was that damn driver's fault. The employee said they'd have to look more thoroughly when the bus was out of commission.

I didn't want to leave without my phone, so I saw no alternative but to stay on for another loop. I tried really hard to take a Buddhist perspective and not be totally pissed off about this waste of my time. The smallest events change the courses of our lives in unpredictable and unknowable ways, so who's to say this waste of my time wouldn't save me from some horrible fate or expose me to some glorious opportunity? Of course, it could also have done the opposite of either of those things, but I tried not to think about that. The point was I didn't know, so I shouldn't be mad. I took the empty spot next to the one girl who had asked me what I was looking for while all the other passengers ignored me. By this point I had turned off my headphones. Maybe she would become my best friend, I thought. Maybe that was the silver lining here. I had the idea to ask if I could log into Google on her phone and use "Find My Phone" to make my phone make a noise even though it was on silent. It took me a while to build up the courage to make such a bold request, but I did, and she said yes.

I put in my email and then her phone just spun a loading circle at me and did nothing. She said she'd just gotten it from her stepdad and it didn't work very well. She played with some settings and tried to fix it. She called her mom. I got up a couple of times to look for my phone again in the same places I had already looked four times. It's not like there were a bunch of nooks or crevices for it to be hiding in. The girl couldn't get her phone to work, but she said I could get off the bus with her and go to her apartment and try to track my phone from her laptop. I couldn't believe it. We were going to be friends! So I did that. Her apartment was surprisingly well-furnished and had two cats, one of whom took an instant liking to me. The girl said that meant I was special. I was okay with that as long as she didn't start saying stuff like she could read my aura and my heart was a nice color and she could see the future. She offered me water and said she was a bad host for not offering sooner. I said it was nice of her to invite me inside in the first place. She said she likes to help people, and if most people were as helpful as her, the world wouldn't be in the state that it's in.

As you may have already guessed, I couldn't log in to Google on her computer because it required a verification code that it sent to my phone. There was literally no other way to do it. No security questions, nothing. She said I could report it as a theft to the police and they could help track it. I hoped it wouldn't come to that because I hate the police. I went back out to the bus stop in front of her apartment, and she asked if I wanted her to wait with me, and I said I didn't care, so she did. She asked about my life, and she said she wanted to go to USU, and that was when I figured out that, contrary to my assumption, she wasn't an adult. She still had a couple years of high school left. I now realized that we wouldn't be friends because it would be inappropriate for me to try to stay in touch in any way. Also, maybe she shouldn't have invited me into her apartment when her parents weren't home. But it's not like she was unfamiliar with stranger danger. When I said I didn't know my roommate before he moved in a couple of weeks ago, she said she hopes he's not a serial killer and doesn't murder me.

Because the bus on this route was so far behind schedule, only partially because of me, another bus came through this time. I went to the original bus and asked the driver about my phone. Still nothing. He said maybe it was in the lost and found. I didn't have time to check right then because I took a detour to campus to turn in my city council ballot. I didn't vote for any incumbents because they all ignored my email of complaint about the police department. Then I walked home and opened "Find My Phone" on my laptop, where fortunately I was already logged into Google. At first it appeared that my phone had somehow fallen off by Mount Logan Middle School, just a few blocks away, even though we hadn't stopped there. But I refreshed the page and saw that, in fact, it was still traveling along the bus route. I took my laptop with me back to the transit center so I could use it to make my phone make noise as soon as the bus pulled in. I could do this because a few months ago, my neighbor didn't pay his power bill, and the WiFi went out, and he gave me access to xfinity WiFi hotspots. I was very curious to see where my phone had ended up and how the hell I had missed it over and over again.

So the bus pulled in, I clicked the button, and I got on. Everyone missed or ignored the noise as they filed off, but as I headed toward the back of the bus it got louder and louder, and then my phone was right there on the floor, exactly where it should have landed when it flew out of my hand in the first place. It wasn't camouflaged by any stretch, but on top of that, the white sticker that I'd found on the grounds of Green Canyon High School and stuck on it that very day was still on it. I was too dumbfounded to be upset. And although I've all but completely lost faith that God intervenes in my life at all, I don't have a better explanation this time. Maybe he had saved me from a horrible fate or exposed me to a glorious opportunity and wanted to make sure I noticed even though I'd probably never figure out what it was.

Nobody really knows what happens after we die. I don't care what people believe, though I get pretty annoyed when atheists assert as a fact that there's nothing after we die. They're supposed to only believe stuff that's empirically verifiable, yet here they are asserting something that they clearly haven't verified because they aren't dead. And there's actually very strong empirical evidence that they're wrong. I should have made the connection months ago, but I didn't until I saw it spelled out in these videos from the excellent YouTube channel Closer to Truth. I'm mostly just going to repeat what Sam Parnia, MD says in the videos.

To recap what I've learned and mentioned before, so-called near-death experiences follow a common pattern across cultures, but they also have differences - most significantly, the identity of the heavenly being that one encounters depends on one's religious background. So they don't necessarily prove anything about the objective reality of the afterlife. Maybe they're a delusion hardwired into our brains and shaped by cultural influences, or maybe a higher power shows itself differently depending on what we're expecting and comfortable with. Also, they can be triggered by drugs or surgeries where one's life isn't actually in danger. But they're very elaborate and have powerful, positive long-term life-changing effects that delusions are not generally known to have. Someone in the comments section on another video suggested that they're an adaptation by the brain to give us a peaceful death if all attemps to keep us alive fail. But a peaceful death does zilch to improve our odds of passing our genes along, so such an adaptation could only have evolved by pure coincidence.

Anyway, Sam Parnia, MD spells out a fact that I should have grasped on my own. The term "near-death experience" is misleading because many of the people who have them are quite literally completely dead. Their hearts and brains have shut down. And for most of history, that would have always been the end of it. But technology has advanced to the point that they can sometimes be brought back to life minutes or even hours after their hearts and brains have shut down, before all their cells have also died. And then they report these near-death experiences. Which means that, regardless of what those experiences can or can't tell us about an afterlife, those people were still conscious while they were dead. I don't know why this isn't being shouted from every rooftop in the world. Before, I just thought maybe they still had some brain activity that we couldn't detect, but now I realize how implausible that is, especially since it would seem to render a lot of detectable brain activity superfluous. Now this doesn't prove that consciousness lasts forever after death, but if it can last at all without a functioning brain to contain it, I don't see why it would just fizzle out some time later. This is a very strong empirical basis for believing that we're eternal beings.

I don't believe in the traditional view of "spirits" (and a lot of modern Christians don't either) because there's no evidence that a body needs a spirit inside it to be alive. Individual cells are alive, clumps of cells are alive, really big clumps of cells (like us) are alive, and there's no indication at any level that the organelles or organs are insufficient to maintain that state on their own. But I agree with the philosophical argument that brain cells and electricity can't produce consciousness on their own because there's a qualitative difference between those physical things and that ethereal, subjective thing. I'm very attracted to the view that consciousness permeates the universe and brains are like radio sets that pick it up. To me, this makes scientific and theological sense. I think our innermost core is consciousness, not spirit. And that actually reminds me of Joseph Smith's idea that we started out as intelligences that are co-eternal with God. I always liked that idea because it solved the problem of God being responsible for our imperfections and our sins. I don't believe he was a prophet by any stretch, but was very intelligent and he may have stumbled onto some correct ideas just by logic. I believe that we are eternal beings and that when we die, we'll be surprised to remember the things we knew before we were born.

Now I can stop being afraid of death and look forward to it again. I think. I just want to reunite with loved ones and explore the universe, but I am still a little concerned about the possibility of reincarnation. I'd actually prefer the total annihilation of my consciousness to having another life on this hellhole planet without retaining anything I learned in this one. But reincarnation is supposed to suck, and the whole point of Hinduism is to get out of it. I'd better live a really good life just in case karma is an actual thing that exists.

In The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, David Bentley Hart argues that there's an insuperable quantitative gap between the the physical material of the human brain and the subjective personal experience of consciousness; in other words, one cannot produce the other on its own. This isn't a "God of the gaps" argument. It's not about what materialism can't explain yet but about an intrinsic limitation of materialism. He insists that no matter how much we learn about someone's brain structure and activity, we will never be able to replicate for ourselves what it's like to be them. He goes into a lot more depth with this argument than I can. He also rejects, for good reason, the scientifically unsupported belief that bodies require spirits inside of them in order to be alive at all. If I understand and remember correctly, he asserts that consciousness flows from God in the same way that existence itself flows from God.

Writing in Psychology Today this week, in an article that was recommended to me by the almighty algorithms because I read some articles on that website about near-death experiences, Steve Taylor makes a similar argument and includes an analogy that blew my mind: "It may be that the human brain does not actually produce consciousness but transmits it. Like a radio, the brain may 'pick up' fundamental consciousness from the space around us and transmit it to us, so that we become individually conscious." To me this makes perfect sense in principle. It explains why the brain's machinery is necessary in the first place, and even why its makeup strongly influences our thoughts and feelings, despite not being the ultimate source of consciousness. And it's so simple. You don't need a book of philosophy to understand it.

It does raise further questions, though. As Taylor points out, the materialist view "also means that there cannot be an afterlife, since human consciousness cannot outlive the brain that produces it" (although I heard a Christian pastor who doesn't believe in the body/spirit dualism explain that God could recreate our personalities and identities in the resurrection exactly as they were, and argue with a skeptic about whether these new people would really still be us). But if the brain just receives and interprets a piece of a big mass of consciousness, do we just get absorbed back into that when we die? I guess becoming part of God, or one with the Force or whatever, would be nice, but I also like being me and don't want to give that up altogether. And if we all become unified into one consciousness at the end, then any love we have for each other ultimately becomes love for ourself, and that just seems a lot less special.

Taylor raises another interesting point: "Until the 19th century, almost every culture in human history took for granted that the essence of human identity was non-physical and would survive the death of the body." It's interesting because it may or may mean anything. It's entirely possible for almost every culture in human history to be wrong about something, and maybe this kind of belief is just coping mechanism for the horrors of mortality. But maybe it's an instinctive understanding that most of us have because it's true and our consciousnesses have advanced far enough to grasp it. David Bentley Hart talks about how we know or at least have reasonable grounds to assume many things that we can't prove scientifically - mathematics, for example. This could be one of those things. It's a real shame that the only way to confirm it for sure is to die.

Tomorrow is Juneteenth. Last year when it became a federal holiday I witnessed a lot of complaining from Utah Republicans who are determined to be horrible people and wrong about everything, but I haven't seen any yet this year. I guess they grew the hell up and got over it. Now if only they could do the same for everything else. We also just had Summerfest, the local arts festival here in Logan, over the last three days. I always go and don't buy any art because it's expensive but then I rationalize buying the expensive food because it's part of the experience. I went alone the first two days and then I went with a friend the last day, and she didn't buy much, but she talked to several of the booth owners and took their business cards, which I guess is the equivalent of clicking "like" on a Facebook fundraiser instead of donating to it. Then last night, because I'm still on the email list for the Mormon Environmental Stewardship Alliance, I attended a screening of "Stewart Udall and the Politics of Beauty" over Zoom. He was a phenomenal guy and the world needs more like him right now to tackle its environmental and social problems. It's funny, though, how Mormonism still claims him and takes credit for his accomplishments even though he stopped practicing it in his twenties, in large part because it was so socially backwards even by 1947 standards.