CvP 3 Christians v Pharisees: Choosing Sides And How To Fight For Them In The Mormon Civil War EPISODE 3 – IT’S A TRAP! How the ‘Pharisee Mormon’ General Authorities have been setting up the young adults for Disillusionment, Divorce and Disempowered W

CHRISTIANS VS PHARISEES:  CHOOSING SIDES AND HOW TO FIGHT FOR THEM IN THE MORMON CIVIL WAR

Episode 3 – IT’S A TRAP!  HOW THE ‘PHARISEE MORMON’ GENERAL AUTHORITIES HAVE BEEN SETTING UP THE YOUNG ADULTS FOR DISILLUSIONMENT, DIVORCE AND DISEMPOWERED WOMEN THIS YEAR… AGAIN   

A NEW HOPE         

THE FARCE AWAKENS                   

THE DESERET EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

THE ROGUE ONE   

ATTACK OF THE DRONES             

RETURN OF THE COMMITTEE 

THE DRONE WARS             

THE PHARISEE MENACE               

SOLO - THE SISTERS’ DESTINY

As a professional teacher of 11 to 18 year olds, how the General Authorities teach the young people and what they teach them is a matter very close to my heart.  And for years now it has been a catastrophic disaster.  They know they have failed spectacularly in this area because 80% of the young people growing up in Mormonism indoctrinated by their sermons and the lesson manuals they authorise are so alienated by that experience they run screaming from the chapel by their early twenties are over and never return.  These statistics were presented to them in a secret briefing in 2008 that you can watch yourself as the film of it was leaked to the Mormonleaks website along with several other very revealing films giving insight into what really goes on in the secret star chamber of the Mormon leadership, and how toe-curlingly paranoid and homophobic senior apostles dominate the roomm, and receive obeiscence from elected Mormon politicians declaring their loyaly to the Church over their voters.  The youth inactivity statistics feature 6 minutes into the presentation titled “In which they fret over the Young Single Adults” if you want to Google it.  In the USA only 30% of young single adults, defined as younger than 30, are still active and internationally outside the USA the total is only 20% actively involved.  They were twice as likely than that to be active if they married in the temple, but internationally only 6% of the young adults were temple married by 30 so that’s still a tiny percentage of the whole, and that statistic is falling. 

There were 100 active young adult women for every 70 young adult men, so 30% of all young adult women in the Church have no chance at all of a temple marriage from the start, and that’s assuming all the active men are safe to marry, which they aren’t, so I would argue something more like 40% or 50% of all female young adult Latter-Day Saints will have no chance whatsoever of marrying in the temple whatsoever.  This is gobsmacking in a Church that intensively brainwashes its young women in particular to obsess about marrying in the temple and 99% of the time defines their worth as entirely dependent on being temple married and a mother with temple-worthy children. The fundamental baseline failure to acknowledge this massive elephant in the room and the pain framing success and approval from God as entirely revolving around a temple married family causes those 40-50 % of active LDS young women is just one of the pillars of the brutal patriarchal misogyny that makes our Church so damaging to women.  And the solution they are offered is…. what amazing LDS author Carol Lynn Pearson calls in the title of her recent book “The Ghost of Mormon Polygamy.”  They will become the polygamous wives of the rare Mormon men that make it to the celestial kingdom in the next life.  Meanwhile, please become a Mormon nun - celibate, single, and devoting yourself to service of other people’s children and teaching them to also obsess about the temple marriage you can never have… until you’re dead.  

A NEW HOPE

In the years following 2008 in which all these statistics have continued to decline it seemed that the General Authorities were recognising the problems and mobilising to address them.  In 2012 they started lowering the age you could go on a mission to 18 to try and lock young people into loyalty to the Church instead of losing them at that age.  In 2013 The Gospel Topics essays were published on the Church website to tell a still whitewashed but nonetheless significantly more honest account of several controversial aspects of the History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that have destroyed the testimonies of hundreds of thousands of Latter-day Saints when they discovered how much the Church has been lying to them about them all their lives.  These included the racist segregation, polygamy, how the book of Mormon and Book of Abraham were really created, and the conflicting accounts by Joseph Smith of his First Vision and the scandalous coverups of some of them.  

Officially approved publications like Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling biography of Joseph Smith, the easy-reading ‘Saints’ books and the Joseph Smith Papers Project making a lot of the archive of original journals and documents from early Mormon history available online all seemed to be saying that the First Presidency and Apostles now accepted that the informed LDS academics they used to call liars and excommunicate for publishing their research were right all along (with no apologies for treating them like enemies of course.) In February 2016 Elder Russell Ballard told the Church Education System staff to get as familiar with these resources as they were with the back of their own hands and start teaching real history from them instead of hiding the information and pushing usually inaccurate faith-promoting fairytales instead. 

It seemed that we were finally entering a new, and shamefully overdue, golden age of honesty, and that significant reforms to the curriculum and what members were told to believe would soon follow. 

THE FARCE AWAKENS

It quickly became apparent though that while the academics and informed Church members were rejoicing and beginning to dream that our Church could regain some credibility by choosing honesty and integrity and institutionally repenting of the deceitful propaganda that backfired and blew up people’s testimonies of Mormonism every time they actually did some proper research into those truth claims, the hearts and minds of the senior General Authorities were just not in it.  Most of them never mentioned these developments in their talks, they only occasionally got a passing mention in some General Conference talks, and it quickly became clear that most of the Apostles neither understood why the Gospel Topics Essays mattered so much or could be bothered to find out, while they continued to give most of their airtime to the usual Pharisaical obsessions with policing people’s hemlines and thoughts and reading habits and making sure they have a current temple recommend.  By taking their eye off the ball and not listening to the endlessly repeated feedback and warnings to them from disillusioned Church members as they left, they failed to provide any kind of pastoral support or context to help the people reading the Gospel Topics Essays and Joseph Smith Papers who were discovering for the first time the true depth and breadth of the lying they were subjected to and had been taught to teach to everyone else.

The General Authorities who now delegate engaging with our history, writing it and defending it to tame scholars and semi-authorised amateur operations like FAIRMormon have not realised that the Gospel Topics Essays do not resolve people’s concerns about our history.  They Magnify them.  They blow them up.  They exponentially increase those concerns because they just admit lie after lie after lie… and then say nothing about how to process that in a religion still telling them that the prophets are infallible and the most trustworthy people on earth who we should base our entire life on following.  There is no apology.  No repentance.  Not even an acknowledgement that it is reasonable to be upset by this stuff except for that one talk given by once-President Uchtdorf.  We are just expected to bury the cognitive dissonance deep and keep pretending everything is OK, and that the dangerous or crazy things the prophet today is making the Church’s official doctrine and policy isn’t going to be disavowed in a future Gospel Topics Essay like all these infallible doctrines and policies of dead prophets have been.  

Once you start reading the Gospel Topics Essay or article on the FAIRMormon website about the one thing that was concerning you you can’t help noticing that there are some other essays and articles about other lies and controversies too…. quite a few.  Crikey...HUNDREDS of them!  And so you start reading THEM…. and in many people’s experience, which they will tell you all about in their Mormon Stories interview or blog or podcast or website or social media group, their entire testimony and trust in the LDS Church is completely, irreversibly destroyed in just a long busy weekend of frantic Googling. In the Church’s own websites.

Because the Apostles still refuse to engage their brains or listen to ordinary people outside their own rarified echo chamber they seem to have no idea that this is happening and that they need to do a lot more about it than tell people not to trust the internet.  This isn’t the 1970’s any more where poor uninformed hapless Mormons fall into the clutches of the publishing Anti-Mormons and their dangerous books and lose their testimonies.  These are the Church’s own resources, trying to do the right thing and be honest, but sitting there like landmines ready to go off and take out another Mormon family because the Church is still not providing the safety equipment needed to disarm or diffuse them.  The way to disarm a nuclear bomb of shameful lies and scandalous behaviour by a religion and its leaders is confession and humble acknowledgement that these things were sins and inexcusable, unreserved apology, reassurances that it will never happen again and vigorously, and publicly re-educating the membership and purging its study guides of justifications and excuses for the things that were wrong. In the LDS Church all we’ve got is proof - mountain ranges of proof that our leaders sinned and lied.  Only President Uchtdorf took the next step of tentatively admitting those things were sins in his talk “Come Join with Us” in October 2013.   The rest of the apostles haven’t even taken that first baby step.  Instead Dallin Oaks famously insisted that the Church never gives apologies, they continue teaching infallibility, but using the human errors of dead prophets excuse when it suits them without acknowledging the fundamental contradiction between the two, and we continue to haemorrhage members who were kicked into the rabbit hole BY the Gospel Topics Essays and the desperately desperate apologetics that FAIRMormon offers up these days like John the Baptist’s severed head on a platter of logical fallacies and gaslighting.  The inexplicably haywire hyperactive hubris and sexual innuendo by Kwaku El and his team of Youtubing teenagers in FAIRMormon’s new Youth wing has blown what was left of their credibility to smithereens.   Plus all the psychological harm inflicted on the departing Mormons by dysfunctional judgmentalism and shaming, and botched interviews and counselling from totally untrained and unqualified clergy.    

THE DESERET EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

The reactionary conservative backlash against the baby steps of progress towards honesty began almost immediately, sometimes delivered by the exact same General Authorities, which was very surreal and disturbing.  At first it seemed like just a few teething problems as some of the Apostles continued to disparage academic research by experts in their fields or the internet in general as a source of information in their talks, but then that message became a drum beat repeated in every General Conference.  Then the same Elder Ballard who had told the Seminary and Institute teachers to stop lying to the kids and appealing to manipulative emotional testimony bearing instead of educating them honestly told outrageous lies about Church history and did every single thing he had told them not to when it was his turn to set the example and speak to the Young Adults in his 2017 Face to Face broadcast with Dallin Oaks as his sidekick.  (They are both in line to be the next 2 presidents of the Church) And since then it has got worse and worse.  It will probably get worse still, but frankly it’s hard to imagine how it COULD get any worse.  Among several examples of hitting rational rock bottom recently the Rasbands’ September 2020 Face to Face question and answer broadcast to the Young Adults of the Church is a very revealing case in point.

Face to Face broadcasts are given a lot of fanfare and build-up online and in social media and invite youth or young adults to submit thousands of questions about their concerns and they are promised authoritative answers from living prophets.  They have become, along with devotional sermons given at the Brigham Young Universities in Provo Utah, Idaho and Hawaii, the main format by which the panicked General Authorities have tried to engage with the young Mormons and try to fortify their testimonies.  So far they have proven a tragic showcase of all the reasons they are LOSING these young people rather than solving the problem by meeting their needs or actually answering their questions.  In the Statler and Waldorf-like advert Elders Ballard and Oaks filmed for their 2017 Face to Face they bantered about the thousands of questions coming in and openly joked that they would be ignoring the difficult ones.  And so they did.  They don’t even try to hide the fact that they are just engaged in manipulative propaganda rather than an honest or sincere dialogue with the young people: 

Oaks: “Elder Ballard and I are excited about the upcoming face to face event on November 19.”

Ballard: “And we are reviewing the preparation for this event. The very large number of questions that we are getting from all over the world.”

Oaks: “I am astonished at the places they come from.  Here’s one from Albania, another from Australia, one from Texas and there are other foreign countries that are stated here like Canada, Zimbabwe, Massachusetts, we even have some from Utah. We are broadcasting from Utah I guess that would with the audience we have here takes care of this state, but the questions are coming in from all over the place.“

Ballard: “And they are in-depth questions that matter a lot In the lives of our young single adults around the world and it’s going to be good to see what answers you’ve got for all these questions that are coming up.”

Oaks: “Get yourself ready! I don’t have answers for a question like “How can I repent?“  That’s a pretty personal matter! On the other hand, decision-making for this age group is critical…”

Ballard: ”Critical!”

Oaks: “...whether it comes to choosing an eternal partner, or choosing a major, or choosing a place to live, or deciding how to share the gospel with your friends. The young adult period is just full of questions.“

Ballard: “And not only are they full of questions, but it is very very important that they understand their role.  Their role in the future of the Church is far beyond maybe what they realise today, and so they need to get answers to some of these questions and stay focused on what really matters in life because we expect them to rise up and take over and direct the affairs of the Church in the future.”

Oaks “Yes, and the young adults that we meet are across a broad spectrum.  Some are filled with the kind of questions that we have here, and some are going forward with their lives in a very confidence way and they look GOOD to me!“

Ballard “I think we would also have to be honest that time maybe some of these questions that there is no answer to.  They’ll be the ones we avoid!”

Oaks “I gave a talk on the plan of salvation at Conference and I tried to stay away from the questions we don’t have answers to because the Lord hasn’t revealed lot of that, but he’s given us enough to go on. And we just need to know how to go on it.“

Ballads “That’s it! Well it will be a delightful experience for Elder Oaks and me to be with you young single adults. We hope you invite all your friends and those that are not members of the Church or that you have a friendship with that they ought to feel welcome to come. We’d like to talk to all of the young people we can.“

Oaks “Exactly. And keep those questions coming. We are looking at them!

Ballads “And soon will be preparing good answers, we hope, and it’ll be a pleasure to be with Elder Oaks....”

In just 4 minutes they admitted the following:

“The young people of the Church are asking ‘in depth questions, questions that matter a lot” but the only questions that make it into their actual Face to Face dialogues are carefully edited shallow ones that are given the same old answers rather than challenging the Apostles to engage in anything new and relevant to their young followers.  

Dallin Oaks has no clue about his current job description as an apostle:  “...I don’t have answers for a question like “How can I repent?“  That’s a pretty personal matter! On the other hand, decision-making for this age group is critical…”     Surely it should be the other way round - that their major focus as apostles should be all about teaching us exactly how to go about repentance and it is the choices about who to marry, what courses to take in our education, where to live and soon that are the PERSONAL ones that they should stay out of.  D&C 6:9 says: “Say nothing but repentance unto this generation” and Mosiah 18:20 says “Yea, even he commanded them that they should preach nothing save it were repentance and faith on the Lord, who had redeemed his people.”  But here we see clearly articulated that these men are entirely wrapped up in the Pharisee religion, not the Christian one. Repentance and pastoral care for the souls of sinners is something that’s none of their business and a personal matter and they don’t have much to say about, but their overriding obsession is policing the marriages and lifestyles of young members to make absolutely sure they follow the one size fits all path imitating their own lives as middle class Mormon Utahns who married in 1951 and 1952.  

They revealed that they regard the difficult testimony-shattering matters young people in the Church are dealing with and writing questions about as something of a passing phase of youth that they just need to endure and push through so they come out the other side as loyal active members ready to be the next generation of leaders in the Church.  And they do not have ANY empathy for the young people who are asking the embarrassing questions they find difficult to answer.  They see them as weak and flakey, not focused on their duty to become worker drones and basically broken compared to the good looking unquestioning and compliant young people they much prefer: 

Ballard: “And not only are they full of questions, but it is very very important that they understand their role.  Their role in the future of the Church is far beyond maybe what they realise today, and so they need to get answers to some of these questions and stay focused on what really matters in life because we expect them to rise up and take over and direct the affairs of the Church in the future.”   Oaks “Yes, and the young adults that we meet are across a broad spectrum.  Some are filled with the kind of questions that we have here, and some are going forward with their lives in a very confidence way and they look GOOD to me!“

Notice how Dallin Oaks defines being confident and going forward with your life as being subservient and complacently and unthinkingly allowing the General Authorities WITHOUT questions to determine where your lives will go forward to.  Surely it takes confidence and taking responsibility for the direction of your life to seek and ask for answers when you encounter evidence that the path they have mapped out for you might be corrupted or dishonest and unsafe?  In Christ’s plan of salvation in Christian Mormonism you ‘work out your own salvation’, you seek to understand correct principles and then you govern YOURSELF, you constantly question everything to sift the wheat from the chaff, you seek further light and knowledge.  You USE your God-given intelligence instead of trying to ignore it.  As the Seminary scripture in Doctrine and Covenants 121 I was taught to memorise as a teenager so beautifully teached, “THEN shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from heaven.  The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever.”  You’ve got it all wrong Dallin!  It’s the kids who are asking the questions who are the confident ones who will be the most powerful and useful future leaders of the church if you will only take them seriously and stop driving them out of it!  THEY are the good-looking ones radiant with the beauty of divine attributes and truth!

THE ROGUE ONE

Ballard “I think we would also have to be honest that there may be some of these questions that there is no answer to.  They’ll be the ones we avoid!”  Oaks “I gave a talk on the plan of salvation at Conference and I tried to stay away from the questions we don’t have answers to because the Lord hasn’t revealed a lot of that, but he’s given us enough to go on. And we just need to know how to go on it.“

It cannot be overstated how significant that confession by Elder Oaks is.  The talk he is referring to is “The Plan and the Proclamation” that he gave in the October 2017 General Conference a month before this Face to Face broadcast.  It was one of the most significant talks given by an Apostle for decades.  In it he laid out his manifesto for the future of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints which he is already dominating ideologically and which he will lead when President Nelson dies.  His vision for the future of the Church is the Pharisee religion with extra emphasis on homophobia and fighting and hating the modern world.  It is a doomed nihilistic vision where the Church continues futile struggles against civil rights and social justice, where the Family Proclamation that Dallin Oaks was probably the primary author of is used as a weapon and the Church continues to be irrelevant and hated in the world, and we are reduced to a tiny remnant of extremist fanatics and give up our commission from Christ to fill and save the people of every nation, kindred and tongue.  He described “the unchangeable nature of His required ordinances” in our religion even though he himself as an apostle has signed off on several fundamental changes to temple and baptism ordinances.  

He worked hard in that talk to normalise and brace Church members for the disapproval and conflicts he knows they were going to face for the rest of their lives defending the Church’s uncompromising hostility to gay people and equal civil rights to marriage for same sex couples, or their right to raise children which he goes on about a lot.  He said “Even as we must live with the marriage laws and other traditions of a declining world, those who strive for exaltation must make personal choices in family life according to the Lord’s way whenever that differs from the world’s way.” and “the actions of those who try to follow God’s plan of salvation can cause misunderstanding or even conflict with family members or friends who do not believe its principles. Such conflict is always so.”

Since then the Church, presumably under his direction, has produced a 14 minute film training Latter-day Saints to deal with the disapproval they are going to experience in their workplaces for defending the Church’s homophobic beliefs and practices titled with no awareness of the irony “Seeking Fairness for All” that you can find if you Google “Respecting Our Differences While Defending Religious Freedom.”

He taught in “The Proclamation and the Plan” that anyone struggling with LGBTQ sexual orientations or gender identities should suck it up and wait for death, after which they would be fixed of they stayed faithful and celibate and wore the right clothes: “Latter-day Saints who understand God’s plan of salvation have a unique worldview that helps them see the reason for God’s commandments, the unchangeable nature of His required ordinances, and the fundamental role of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Our Savior’s Atonement reclaims us from death and, subject to our repentance, saves us from sin. With that worldview, Latter-day Saints have distinctive priorities and practices and are blessed with the strength to endure the frustrations and pains of mortal life.”

Of course it’s always hilariously hypocritical when Mormon leaders declare that God’s laws of marriage are unchanging eternal principles, specially the ones with the polygamous ancestors who are already sealed to more than one wife like Dallin Oaks is.  

He unilaterally declared the Proclamation on the Family to be a revelation from God, NOT just a “policy,” and that we must all accept it as such with all its implications about every person’s sexuality and gender identity being entirely heteronormative and heterosexual at birth that we cannot disagree with at all or by definition we are not converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we don’t believe in exaltation and we don’t aspire to be exalted.  What terrifies him is that there are plenty of active and faithful Latter-day Saints like me and millions of others who are definitely converted to the Restored gospel of Jesus Christ, who believe in exaltation and aspire to be exalted one day but who definitely do not agree with the unscientific and dangerous messages in the Family Proclamation that Dallin Oaks is obsessed with that people cannot possibly be born Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender or Queer.  The science is in and it is unequivocal.  You can.  You can absolutely be born LGBTQ, not just as a psychological experience but as a genetic reality or a developmental consequence of how your brain and your body are constructed as you develop in the womb and continue to grow under the control of the epigenetic interactions of your genes and various hormones in your mother’s womb and your own internal organs.  

Dallin Oaks said “I gave a talk on the plan of salvation at Conference and I tried to stay away from the questions we don’t have answers to because the Lord hasn’t revealed a lot of that, but he’s given us enough to go on. And we just need to know how to go on it.“  My best guess is that this is his slightly garbled way of saying that actually he did speak assertively in terms of absolute truth about things he isn’t actually so sure of, or which are ambiguous, even though traditional-minded members greeted his talk with glee as sticking it to the liberals and reassuring them that their extreme discomfort with or hostility towards LGBTQ people was absolutely fine and how God feels about them too.  There wasn’t really anything related to sexuality and gender identity that he didn't address from a Pharisaical point of view - he taught that God made us all cisgender and heteronormative so anyone claiming to be gay or transgender is clearly mistaken.  He taught that God made the lesser terrestrial and telestial kingdoms for them to live n, but the church only needs to concern itself with people who actually want to be in the Celestial kingdom and are ‘willing’ to meet the requirements of a heterosexual temple marriage.  I’d love to know what questions about these matters he thinks he DIDN'T address and avoided mentioning because it hasn’t been revealed to him yet.  

ATTACK OF THE DRONES

Even if you believe the idea in the Proclamation that everyone’s spirit was made by God to be distinctly male or female and all heterosexual, when faced with people you love who are told by the Church that they must just endure an entire lifetime as celibate monks and nuns till they die and put the most fundamental component of their development in their life on earth on hold and never have romantic or married or parenting relationships because somehow God screwed up, or intentionally victimised them, by putting their cisgender hetereosexual souls into transgender or homosexual bodies, the LGBTQ-phobic positions of the Proclamation and the General Authorities quickly lose credibility. And to then have those Apostles ramp up the hostility even further into attack mode and command in the name of God that we should exclude them, persecute them and even mobilise to campaign against their civil rights and legal protections even if they aren’t members of our Church, and then exclude their innocent children from our saving ordinances, priesthood and temples, s**t gets very real very fast and the ethical credibility of the Church’s position blows up in a mushroom cloud of sparkling rainbow coloured confetti.  It just feels all wrong, and they don’t believe that God is that kind of a cruel and intolerant bigot or wants them to be.  We even have an article of faith about people only being punished for things they choose for themselves.  It is a foundational Mormon principle that you cannot be held responsible for or punished by God and His Church for things you have no choice or control about.  And having lived through the appalling horrors and failures of the November 2015 Policy of Exclusion and the inept political campaigns the Church funded and told us to fight in against equalising the legal age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals or legalising same sex marriage, our patience waiting for these relics from the 1950’s to get with the 21st century has run out. 

The Family Proclamation is already out of date scientifically and a lot of the General Authorities know that, except ironically the Heart Surgeon one and the constitutional lawyer in the First Presidency, which is why very soon after it was first proclaimed there has been extreme reluctance to try and canonise it as scripture by the less fanatical prophets and apostles. If Boyd K Packer was already being restrained from declaring it to be a revelation in 2010 you can totally understand Dallin Oaks’ desperate panic as he realises the tide has turned and it won’t be long before the clear MAJORITY of converted and exaltation-aspirational Latter-day Saints have abandoned both its LGBTQ-phobia and misogynist sexism.  Dallin knows his precious life’s work he has been building up to since he was first ordained an apostle and immediately commissioned to plan and implement the Church’s multi-faceted campaigns against civil rights and social acceptance for LGBTQ people is sifting away like sand between his fingers, tantalisingly close to his ascension to the throne of the Presidency; so until he has absolute authority, his only weapon is his rhetoric.  And boy does he use it in this talk! 

 “The gospel plan each family should follow to prepare for eternal life and exaltation is outlined in the Church’s 1995 proclamation, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” Its declarations are, of course, visibly different from some current laws, practices, and advocacy of the world in which we live. In our day, the differences most evident are cohabitation without marriage, same-sex marriage, and the raising of children in such relationships. Those who do not believe in or aspire to exaltation and are most persuaded by the ways of the world consider this family proclamation as just a statement of policy that should be changed. In contrast, Latter-day Saints affirm that the family proclamation defines the kind of family relationships where the most important part of our eternal development can occur.”

“The family proclamation begins by declaring “that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.” It also affirms that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” It further declares “that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.”

“In 1995 a President of the Church and 14 other Apostles of the Lord issued these important doctrinal statements.”

“Subjects were identified and discussed by members of the Quorum of the Twelve for nearly a year. Language was proposed, reviewed, and revised. Prayerfully we continually pleaded with the Lord for His inspiration on what we should say and how we should say it. We all learned “line upon line, precept upon precept,” as the Lord has promised (D&C 98:12).  During this revelatory process, a proposed text was presented to the First Presidency, who oversee and promulgate Church teachings and doctrine….. I testify that the proclamation on the family is a statement of eternal truth, the will of the Lord for His children who seek eternal life. It has been the basis of Church teaching and practice for the last 22 years and will continue so for the future. Consider it as such, teach it, live by it, and you will be blessed as you press forward toward eternal life.  Forty years ago, President Ezra Taft Benson taught that “every generation has its tests and its chance to stand and prove itself.”  I believe our attitude toward and use of the family proclamation is one of those tests for this generation. I pray for all Latter-day Saints to stand firm in that test…. I testify of the truth and eternal importance of the family proclamation, revealed by the Lord Jesus Christ to His Apostles for the exaltation of the children of God (see Doctrine and Covenants 131:1–4), in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

RETURN OF THE COMMITTEE

In this talk Dallin Oaks completely rewrote the script about how revelations are received from the Christian one to the Pharisee one.  In Dallin’s Pharisee Fantasy World revelations are given to prophets not by God or an angel appearing and speaking directly to the prophet but they are made … by committees!  Committees of General Authorities and lawyers (and General Authorities like him who ARE lawyers) have lots of meetings thrashing out a text they can all agree on for months and then when the committee is happy with it the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve continue to chew on it until they are willing to sign off on it and proclaim they have a new infallible revelation of God’s will that it is essential for us all to believe if we want exaltation. 

Now it’s my turn to be old fashioned.  I distinctly remember growing up in a Church that went on and on and on about how the early Christian Church quite quickly became apostate and corrupted and one of the clearest indicators of their apostasy was that they stopped having revelations of God to their leaders.  The vivid visionary dream, the angelic visitation, the voice of God calling to the faithful apostle or prophet from the sky disappeared and was replaced by making fundamental decisions about their practice and doctrine… with committees!!  Committees of the top tier of the priesthood hierarchy meeting for weeks or months to pray and debate and vote on the text of a new creed or proclamation that would become binding on all the Catholics or whoever to accept as God’s true doctrine.  Oh how we laughed at how obviously uninspired such a process was, how human beings doing what any committee of lawyers and clerics could do to create an important sounding text and then presenting it as the voice of God to His Church was so ludicrously disconnected from the real ways God reveals truth that we read about in the scriptures. There’s not a single example of revelation by committee in the scriptures!  What were these apostate people thinking?!  Thank goodness we have proper prophets and would never have to resort to such desperate uninspired measures as that to get a revelation.  You can imagine then how far my jaw dropped when I sat watching Dallin Oaks give this talk and declare that this is how our Church makes revelations now and described it as if this is how it has always been.  I think there’s still a dent in the floor!  It was - literally - unbelievable!  I just couldn’t believe he was throwing yet another fundamental Mormon principle onto the bonfire of his homophobic vanities. He will sacrifice anything and anyONE for it.  No doctrine is safe.    It was the Mormon equivalent in the Pharisee coup d’etat in our Church in the 21st century of the moment in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ when after leading a revolution against the human farmers the pigs started to dress and sound exactly like the humans they had overthrown and declared that two legs was good and 4 legs bad after all. 

What he of course left out is that there has never been a common consent vote of the Church membership to sustain the Proclamation as a revelation.  He left out that no other Apostles have publicly declared the Family Proclamation to be a revelation that I have noticed, so this fails the test Dallin Oaks has taught since that all the Apostles have to sustain something as a revelation before it can be declared to be authorised and binding on the Church membership, although he is now trying to spin the apostles signing the Proclamation as the same as them declaring it to be revealed scripture. 

And he left out that when Boyd K Packer as President of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles attempted in his October 2010 General Conference talk titled “Cleansing the Inner Vessell” to do exactly the same as Dallin Oaks and unilaterally declare the Family Proclamation to be a revelation, he was immediately slapped down by President Monson despite his senior role and publicly humiliated by having the text version of that talk edited in the Ensign and Conference reports to remove the word “revelation.”  What President Packer actually said was: “Fifteen years ago, with the world in turmoil, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles issued “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” the fifth proclamation in the history of the Church. It qualifies according to the definition as a revelation and it would do well that the members of the Church to read and to follow.”

How it now reads in the official text is “Fifteen years ago, with the world in turmoil, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles issued “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” the fifth proclamation in the history of the Church. It is a guide that members of the Church would do well to read and to follow.”

The difference when Dallin Oaks spoke in October 2017 was that President Monson was now completely in the grip of dementia and just a few months from death and Dallin was so impatiently desperate and champing at the bit to charge forward with his obsession with his Proclamation creation and his own vision for the present and future of the Church, which he is aware there is growing opposition to in the Church as more and more members decide they aren’t comfortable ostracising LGBTQ people, he decided to act as if President Monson was already dead, he was already President of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles or President of the Church, and rush to the pulpit like a ravening homophobic rottweiler and hammer home his message into the hearts and minds of the members with such repetitive and uncompromising force that it would be impossible to ignore or backtrack on.  Anyone contradicting him now would be seen as forfeiting their actual eternal life and siding with the world in the most important test of our faith in God our generation would face! And almost every talk he has given since this one has been repeating the same key points over and over again, with epic implications for and hostility towards any LGBTQ Latter-day Saints and their families and allies. 

In this talk Dallin Oaks presented a watertight declaration of revealed truth about everybody’s covenant path and how there is no place on it anywhere for gay or transgender people who he insists cannot be born that way, something Elder Packer ALSO declared in this “Cleansing the Inner Vessell” talk when he said “We teach a standard of moral conduct that will protect us from Satan’s many substitutes or counterfeits for marriage. We must understand that any persuasion to enter into any relationship that is not in harmony with the principles of the gospel must be wrong. From the Book of Mormon we learn that “wickedness never was happiness.”  Some suppose that they were preset and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn temptations toward the impure and unnatural. Not so! Remember, God is our Heavenly Father.   Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, he is our father.”  That last line “Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, he is our father.” was also edited out of the official written version of the talk published by the Church.  

But at least these days they still show the full original video on the Church website along with the edited text rather than making the offending apostle re-record a fake video of the new edited version and pretend it was what was actually said in General Conference like they did to poor Elder Ronald Poelman of the Seventy in October General Conference of, ironically, actual 1984.  Elder Poelman gave a stunning Christian Mormon talk titled “The Gospel and the Church” about how the Gospel is more important than and not the same thing as the institutional church and how our spiritual journey of progression takes us beyond the confines of passively receiving instructions from Pharisees as we progress towards becoming like God. This of course alarmed and upset the control freak Pharisees in the First Presidency who could not allow members to think there is any difference between their infallible leadership and what Jesus wants the Gospel to be.  You can easily Google footage of both talks side by side and I thoroughly recommend it - his original version was one of the most important General Conference talks of the 20th Century and we are still desperately in need of learning the lesson he was teaching if we are to save our religion from the Pharisees.  My overarching theme with these posts is that the civil war between Christians and Pharisees within the same institution of God’s Church has always been going on so we shouldn’t be surprised by that, but we also need not to ignore it and we must have the courage to stand up and speak up, as Elder Poelman did, to fight that civil war instead of surrendering to Pharisees and their ideology whoever and wherever they are.  That extraordinary video of Elder Poelman’s “The Gospel and the Church” talk enables us to see presented simultaneously what the same Mormon General Authority will preach from the General Conference pulpit when he is allowed to preach the religion of Christian Mormonism or forced to preach the religion of Pharisee Mormonism.  And joy of joys the subject of his talk was literally about the difference between the two.  Peter Bleakley is not making this stuff up in his head and disturbing your peace with something that isn’t real in our Church or some twisted personal interpretation of everything that’s going on.  The Pharisee control freaks are real and we can watch in real time how they bully and corrupt the Christians among the General Authorities. 

President Monson pushing back against President Packer’s attempts to declare the Family Proclamation to be a revelation and insist that no gay or transgender people are born that way was really remarkable - a rare moment of fighting for the Christian side against the momentum of Pharisaical homophobia and transphobia that thought it had won a stunning victory against admitting people might be born transgender or gay with the Family Proclamation.  The reason the Proclamation was originally written by committees of General Authorities and lawyers was to justify the Church getting involved in legally challenging the legislation to legalise same-sex marriage in Hawaii, the first USA state to seriously try to do that, which of course Dallin Oaks lied about in his ‘Proclamation and the Plan’ talk when he said it was a revelation ahead of its time with no worldly reason for its timing.  

Eventually I suppose he will just lie every time he exhales as he continues like President Nelson to keep rewriting our history to suit his obsessions….So as soon as President Monson was incapacitated Dallin Oaks was putting the jackboot in and resurrecting Boyd K Packer’s gameplan and, as he obviously saw it, righting President Monson’s wrong in reigning in PACKER’S homophobia obsession.

What does all this mean for us today and the future survival of our religion?

As I keep saying, the astonishing thing about the Pharisee invasion and takeover of our Church is that it isn’t happening in secret.  The leaked secret Apostle meetings have been helpful in finding out some of what’s really going on, but the vast majority of the proof is being publicly presented and blabbed to the world by the Apostles in broadcasts and folksy chats to camera like The Oaks and Ballard invitation to their Face to Face that are so full of Freudian slips it’s like sliding around on an ice rink just listening to them! As I also keep saying, whoever the Public Relations handlers of these General Authorities are must be either utterly incompetent because they got their jobs through nepotism or they are wetting themselves laughing at these bumbling General Authorities behind their backs as they edit and post these car crashes, or maybe they are competent enough to realise what a disaster they are but realise it is more than their job is worth to tell these powerful old men what terrible mistakes they are making.  Any PR peon with basic common sense would have made sure the footage of that little chat was immediately burned and the ashes carefully packed into a rocket and launched into the centre of the sun to absolutely ensure their complete destruction, and that anyone who witnessed it was immediately taken out the back of the the Church Office Building and shot.  But no, instead they posted it online for all to see, and these naive General Authorities who used to be a car salesman and a constitutional lawyer have not experienced pushback or scrutiny or having to be careful what they say for years now so they have forgotten how to be careful not to give their gameplan for manipulating customers or trial juries away every time they open their mouths.

So of course Dallin Oaks admitted in front of a camera that when he gave his momentous ‘Proclamation and the Plan’ talk he really didn’t know what he was talking about and was nothing like as confident about the truths he asserted so confidently regarding gender identity and sexuality and who is acceptable to God.   I wonder which aspects of those matters he privately thinks we don’t have enough revealed from God to give confident answers about….

Oaks “I gave a talk on the plan of salvation at Conference and I tried to stay away from the questions we don’t have answers to because the Lord hasn’t revealed a lot of that, but he’s given us enough to go on. And we just need to know how to go on it.“

The whole set up of the Face to Face interviews is very carefully planned and controlled and the General Authorities make sure they control what questions are asked and select them to suit their own agenda while pretending to be letting the young people lead the conversation. 

And over and over again their response to cries of pain from intelligent internet-confident teenagers and young adults is “There’s no problem with the Church, the problem is with YOU not being faithful or diligent enough.  You must STOP thinking, and STOP researching because if we can’t answer your questions noone can, so you have to put them all on a shelf and wait for God to tell you personally what the answers are.  Please please please don’t remember right now that the whole entire point of OUR job as prophets and apostles is to go to God at our weekly Thursday meeting with Jesus in the temple and get those answers for you…. except when you are bearing your testimony to people.  THEN you can remember this and tell your audience that that’s what we do all the time, but please for heaven’s sake, don’t expect us to actually DO it!  If you don’t have answers for stuff, that’s on God.  It’s because HE hasn’t given them to YOU, not us.  And if you leave the Church your life will fall apart into suicidal depression and drug abuse…  and you will disappoint everyone and miss out on eternal blessings for you and all your descendants - no pressure.  And just follow the prophet and let him do all your thinking for you.”

The parents of these kids who I KNOW assume that the Church has moved on from this kind of totally unhelpful and unrealistic propaganda and manipulation we were fed as young adults because they keep telling me it has improved seem not to have bothered actually checking what the apostles are saying to their own children.  Start finding out, leaders and parents.  Actually watch these broadcasts.  Think about what is being said and how it is being said. Open your eyes and your ears.  It’s horrifying.  They have learned and changed nothing, and if anything it is getting worse.  The Pharisees have only one script and it will never stop being the script of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints till we get rid of the Pharisees.  That illusion of progress you believe is happening and that you are MAKING happen in how you try to lead and teach locally is definitely NOT happening at the top.  These Apostles do NOT have your back - they are stabbing you in the back every time they talk to your children and set them up just like they did the generation of young people before them who have already left for disillusionment, divorce and disempowered women.  

And they do it all while talking to these young ADULTS as if they are literally 6 year olds. We are so used to that patronising and childish and infantilising style of speaking and teaching from our General Authorities we too easily forget to notice that most of them are talking to us all as if we are 6 year olds with 6 year old minds.   We enter a bizarre parallel world of Mormon fairytales where the one size fits all certainties of the McConkie Mormonism formula for living and believing in Utah is still the only game in town, and women are just for making and gushing about babies or telling you sweetly not to question the men who are in charge of you. 

Do you think I’m exaggerating?  Brace yourself, we’re going in. This is the response of an Apostle and his wife to all the sophisticated crises our young people are having in response to their lies and endless self-contradictions and the complete incompatibility of their fanciful Pharisaical formula for dealing with the realities of our actual lives and situations in the third decade of the 21st century.  The future is now, and it sounds remarkably like the past.  We are back to 1984 and everything has been stripped back to the absolute bare bones of McConkie Mormonism Pharisaical brainwashing.  There is nothing in this Face to Face that acknowledges any of the doctrinal, intellectual or social progress that occurred in the Church since 1984.  Just the progress of technology:

Sister Rasband: “If I may introduce us just a little bit, Elder Rasband and I have been married 47 years and our wonderful 5 children married FABULOUS spouses and have given us 28 grandchildren with one on the way, and believe it or not we have our first GREAT grandchild!“

Elder Rasband:  “Now does she look like a great grandmother?! Answer me that question. She does not!  In fact the parents of that great grandchild are here with us tonight.“

Interviewer: “For our next question, the Proclamation states that Jesus Christ has once again called apostles to the Earth to lead the Church. So Harriet from Wyoming asked “What advice do you have for when we feel uncomfortable with certain Church teachings or policies? How can we continue to sustain our leaders when we may struggle with feelings of disagreements and confusion?“

EB: “Well, Harriet, that is a very important question and it’s one I have sincerely thought about before answering tonight. We’d like to begin by teaching you all a very critical doctrine, so we’ve asked Sister Rasband to read a couple of scriptures you can follow along if you like and then I’ll comment more on Harriet’s question.”   SR “From Amos 3:7 ‘Surely the Lord will do nothing but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.’ And in modern revelation the Lord added in Doctrine and Covenants 21:4-5 ‘Wherefore, meaning the church, thou shalt give heed unto all his words and commandments which he shall give unto you as he receiveth them, walking in all holiness before me;  For his word ye shall receive, as if from mine own mouth, in all patience and faith.”

RB “Now Dear, as you know that scripture, that last scripture, was in the beginning of the Doctrine and Covenants given to the prophet Joseph Smith. And it was about him, but it’s also about every prophet who has followed the prophet Joseph Smith up until this very day with President Russell M Nelson. Now I love a quote given back in the 70s by Ezra Taft Benson that I’d like to share with you tonight.  President Benson said this: “Therefore the most crucial reading and pondering which you should do is the latest inspired words from the Lord’s mouthpiece.”  Now, the prophet speaks to all of us frequently. It used to be that you’d have to wait till General Conference or maybe an occasional article in one of the Church magazines but now, and your generation knows this, the President of the Church and all of the apostles frankly are using their social media accounts to give their latest inspired teachings to the members of the Church.  So I invite all you young single adults throughout the world, and I’m not trying to give a commercial here, but I am inviting you to follow the Presidents of the Church certainly, and the other members of the First Presidency and the Twelve as you can, and you will have the latest, most inspired teachings of God’s prophet on the Earth today.”

I hope the Twitter feed editors of the 15 Prophets, Seers and Revelators’ realise they are now responsible for constantly teaching the world the very latest and most important and accurate ever revelations of God’s mind and will for us all!    Having looked as some of those social media feeds in recent years I really don’t think they are competing with, or more useful and wise than, the scriptures or the best of the teachings of previous generations of prophets; but in a Pharisaical system that is all about entrenching unquestioning obedience to the current leadership class there is no such thing as objective eternal truth.  Truth can keep changing with every new sermon or social media comment by an Apostle.  Truth is what the current leaders say it is, even if it they are totally contradicting what their predecessor prophets said, or contradicting the scriptures, or contradicting what other apostles and prophets just said in their Ensign article or facebook post was the truth, or contradicting what they themselves taught was the truth last week or 3 years ago. Conformity and unconditional trust and obedience is the hallmark of righteous faithful Pharisaical Mormon living, not Christian Mormon truth seeking.  

Another key characteristic of Pharisees though is hypocrisy.  While the Apostles line up to tell us to unquestioningly follow the prophet, they are rather too lazy to do it themselves.  President Nelson recently told us that he had a revelation from God for us all telling us to post examples of our gratitude in social media every day for the 7 days leading up to American Thanksgiving - amazing coincidence there.  There’s no way President Nelson could have thought of that without divine intervention!  The Mormon bloggernacle was flooded every day with obedient Latter-day Saints doing what God commended and telling us all about the things they were grateful for every day.  There wasn’t a resounding response from the actual apostles though.  3 of the apostles posted... nothing in their social media feeds, and the highest tally any of them was Elder Renlund with 4, and President Nelson himself only posted on 2 days!  You just couldn’t make it up could you?  What does this tell us?!  None of them believe their own propaganda!  And rather a lot of them are so fed up with President Nelson’s shallow gimmicks presented as momentous revelations they have disconnected themselves from them entirely and presumably are just waiting for him to hurry up and die and go away.  They can’t even fake 7 tweets to keep things jollying along with an illusion of unity. 

THE DRONE WARS

This insistence that prophets always speak the truth, but that you should ignore the previous prophets and only pay attention to the living one if they disagree, is one of the most fundamental internal contradictions and conundrums that ties Pharisaical Mormons up in knots, and destroys their credibility.  Either God has, and wants us to know, unchanging truth and his prophets all perfectly channel that one unchanging truth and therefore they will never contradict each other or themselves, whether they are alive now or were teaching in the Bronze Age, so there is no need to discount or supersede what dead prophets said with what living prophets are saying… OR there is a lot of human error in what prophets think God is saying to them, OR the truth is that in a world where God has allowed humans complete freedom He can only teach us on a level that the culture and civilisations we are evolving can understand and cope with.  So when the people He is talking to are Bronze Age warrior tribes He has to give them tough laws and advice that works for ignorant fighting nomads in a desert and thus we get the gospel of Genesis and Exodus, and when when they develop iron age civilisations with international trade and much more science and engineering we get the rest of the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Book of Mormon, and when they are living in the post-enlightenment scientific industrial revolution of the 19th Century we get the Restoration and the Doctrine and Covenants, and so on as our understanding and civilisation hopefully steadily improves. 

But because the Pharisees stupidly insist on holding on to all the LDS prophets being infallible, they have to keep selling an obviously contradictory idea.  They cannot totally ignore the reality that the current leaders of the Church regularly contradict the doctrines and policies of dead ones, or what they themselves used to teach was essential eternal and unchanging truth, but they really try to distract their followers from remembering that and try to hide this this contradiction under a cosy blanket of platitudes by endlessly repeating the mantra that the current living prophet should be treated as infallible and having the most up to date and accurate opinion about everything that God wants us to live by here and now.  

To a rational mind this immediately includes in that framework the implication that previous statements by leaders teaching the opposite were therefore wrong when they taught those things as the absolute eternal truth, whether it is about race or contraception or the age of the earth or whether LGBTQ people are born that way or making sinful free will choices, or Adam is God, or that Joseph Smith never used a pebble he found digging a well to translate the Book of Mormon, or you can’t have a temple recommend if you drink Coca Cola or have oral sex with your wife, or whatever.  But in doing that you throw away the idea that God doesn’t keep changing His mind about what truth is.  There is no eternal unchanging truth about anything. So the contradictory explanation that the Pharisees have to keep trying to convince us to believe, even though it makes no sense, is to admit that the truths the prophets taught have constantly changed, but to pin the blame on God because it is never human error because the prophets are infallible and only speak the truth as President Nelson has taught.  

It’s God changing his mind each time, not them.  They’re just the obedient messengers!  And it is not our place to reason why - just go with the prophetic flow.  Forget all those scriptures about prophets revealing plain and precious truths.  The scriptures don’t matter anyway because they are so, like YESTERDAY, and the words of the prophets we should really bother ourselves with, as Elder Rasband taught the young adults, are now in today’s latest Twitter feed.  In Pharisee Fantasy Land where it is GOD who keeps changing His mind as often as the human Mormon General Authorities do, our job is just to try and keep up with that and try not to wonder why God keeps changing His mind about stuff.  

The obvious way to unplug this blockage to common sense and rational belief is to acknowledge that while God may be unchanging and consistent in what He regards as truth, we as human beings are on a long journey of learning and progression, including our prophets.  Like babies progressing in understanding through stages from toddler to kindergarten and primary school to secondary and tertiary education, and into experienced adulthood and on to actual Godhood, we have to keep adding insight and sophistication to our beliefs and leave the oversimplified models of the past behind, and embrace new insights and wisdom, and admit that what we used to think when we were younger was actually quite inaccurate and we are doing better now, and still have a long way to go. 

The absolute tragedy is that real Christian Mormonism teaches regularly this completely rational and realistic way to embrace and work with this truth.  In fact it is one of the foundational, beautiful treasures Mormonism offers to save the Christian world from several of its disabling errors. We teach that humans are all on that long journey from intelligent sparks of life to eventually being able to fire up and learn and become everything that God is, and then help another generation of intelligences along the same journey eternally.  That is what being human and being a God is all FOR.  It is the ultimate meaning and purpose of our existence, not to be abusively treated pets invented by a lonely God who craved love and attention but is still so sadistic He has no problem torturing His creations in vats of burning sulfur if they don’t play by all his random rules, or He just predestines them to fail from the start, like the various manifestations of what became the traditional Christian God does.

Christian Mormonism teaches that God is working with us where we are like any good parent - He is guiding us to make the next step.  He is still speaking to us personally and collectively, and when we or our prophets are really listening carefully and intelligently with pure motives we get beautiful insights and knowledge about where to take our development next, but the work is far from over and we all, including our prophets, make terrible mistakes, but if we all help each other, if we are all heard, if common consent collective wisdom of all of us is applied to filter and authorise or oppose every significant idea coming from the apostles and prophets, we will mostly thrive and make far fewer mistakes while patiently acknowledging each others’ humanity and brokenness.

But Pharisaical Mormonism cannot allow that path to be followed because it means the Apostles and prophets have to join in doing the difficult bits, and this might be even MORE difficult that writing 7 tweets, so it’s a big ask and they are so important and busy they really don’t have time for this.  They would have to admit and repent of their own weaknesses and sins and mistakes.  They would have to listen to US rather than just demanding we listen to them.  They would have to be forgiving and patient towards us rather than insisting that it is us who should forgive the prophets like Joseph Smith for his mistakes and “give Brother Joseph a break” as Elder Anderson put it in General Conference, while insisting that none of that applies to us.  God cannot look upon our sin with the least degree of allowance. We can only be acceptable to God by proving our perfect exact obedience on the covenant path and if we are too gay or too inclined to notice when they are lying and say so in public or whatever, that’s a deal breaker.  They won’t cut us the slack they expect us to cut them.  And they are definitely not doing to put up with anyone disagreeing with them about anything at all since the previous prophets made mistakes and therefore it is just as likely that what they are teaching in their twitter feed or General Conference sermon right now is a human error. How could the Church possibly function without everyone believing they are infallible?!  It would be mayhem! 

THE PHARISEE MENACE 

Christian Mormonism is not trapped in the Pharisaical control freakery that teaches that you must constantly change your beliefs and practices to whatever the current apex predator in our bureaucratic hierarchy tweeted today or changed in the allegedly eternal, essential and unchanging temple ordinances, and that you are never allowed to be disturbed by those constant changes and contradictions or think about them or talk about them, because they really do still insist that once the prophet speaks the thinking has been done.  Our entire response must be limited to bowing our heads and saying “Yes” and not worrying that something fundamental was just changed, because that is now the past and doesn’t matter any more or need explaining or healing or apologising for because that would be too much hassle for the prophets and apostles to have to deal with and raise awkward questions they would much rather you didn’t think about.  So they keep teaching following the living prophet unquestioningly as the ultimate virtue because HE knows the way…. so you don’t have to!  Just live your life with a blindfold on and let him guide you in every moment as God changes the truth again.  It doesn’t need to make sense.  It doesn’t need to be consistent.  It doesn’t need to be rational.  He will just tell you what to think and do about what is true today. It’s out of your hands and you are safe.  

And of course in Christian Mormonism that is exactly, precisely, word for word, Lucifer’s plan for our salvation.  Don’t think.  Don’t choose for yourself.  Don’t learn.  Don’t progress.  Don’t aspire to be anything but a compliant smiling follower.  Just OBEY.  These Pharisaical LDS Apostles and prophets are teaching satanism as if it is a Christian virtue.  Over and over again. 

And when a young adult asks a perfectly reasonable question which acknowledges the messy reality of all the contradictions and errors in our human prophets’ teachings and actions like “What advice do you have for when we feel uncomfortable with certain Church teachings or policies? How can we continue to sustain our leaders when we may struggle with feelings of disagreements and confusion?“ the response from these Apostles over and over again is to speak to us adults literally as if they are speaking to a 6  year old with the same patronising tone of voice and massive oversimplifications and say, or sing, “Follow the prophet, follow the prophet, Follow the prophet; don’t go astray. Follow the prophet, follow the prophet, Follow the prophet; he knows the way.”  And that’s about it - no sophistication, no acknowledgement of what the problems and contradictions causing those concerns are.  Just a blanket testimonial response that you can totally trust the prophet and there is no percentage of anything he is saying or doing at all that is in any way anything less than completely safe or right for you and everyone to trust and believe and do. They are infallible, so what’s your problem?  There is no problem. Remember, this was a broadcast for young adults, people in their twenties and thirties with education, careers and, as they gleefully pointed out, children of their own.  Not primary children. 

The later question Elder Rasband referred to in these introductory dialogues was “I have serious problems with the truth claims of the Church and I am considering removing my name from the records of the Church.  Can you give me a reason why I should stay?”

In response Elder and Sister Rasband didn’t mention anything about truth claims or how to process those or mention any of the truth claims of the Church that are proving the most difficult for people to believe, or are discovering the Church lied to them about.  Instead they went whole hog for emotional manipulation by immediately cutting to a film with a soaring orchestral soundtrack about a young man who was struggling with suicidal depression and was saved by joining the Church, and then they cut to him with his new wife who is about to be sealed to him to talk about how the Church is everything to him now….   All of which is nothing at all to do with the issues of faith crisis because of truth claims…. and suggested praying for a spiritual witness and thinking of Jesus.  That was it.  Just get married in the temple and focus on having lots of faithful Mormon descendants. The sealing power binds families together and if you don’t stay in the Church all those children you could have will miss out.  A pat on the head and a guilt trip.

And sister Rasband chimed in to tell us not to focus on critical literature on the internet or you will be “STUCK in rebellion”!!!!! Only listen to Mormon propaganda and you will be fine, then Elder Rasband finished with ‘Put your issues and feelings on the shelf’ and the answers will come one day.    This is how Mormon Pharisees constantly dodge responsibility to engage with defending their truth claims.  Your actual intellectual and rational concerns and questions are simply not real to them.  They can’t possibly be real because their version of Mormonism is perfect and makes sense to them.  Like the Soviet and Chinese totalitarian communist systems, if you disagree with the leaders the only rational explanation for that is that you are mentally ill and that’s what needs treating.  Your thoughts and questions and concerns are just FEELINGS, so the solutional is emotional.  Stop thinking about them, put them on a shelf and trust us that they will be sorted out one day, and meanwhile get back to being an unquestioning drone and everything will be fine.  I know you just told us your shelf has actually broken under the weight of concerns about our lies and contradictions and overclaiming about truth, but we’ll totally ignore that and pretend you can just reboot and that you still have a shelf, because we have no answers at all to your real concerns and questions:

Question: “I have serious problems with the truth claims of the Church and I am considering removing my name from the records of the Church. Can you give me a reason why I should stay?

Elder Rasband: “Harry, the first thing I want to say to you, and to any others who might be on the edge with that kind of a concern right now, is DON’T YOU DO IT! Don’t you remove your name from the records of the Church. Maybe it would able to help to reframe your question this way, not as why you should stay but perhaps the more positive approach of why I and so many others choose to stay, including I would suspect hundreds of thousands of you who are watching this broadcast tonight. Think of it as to why do I choose to stay.“

Video shown of suicidally depressed young man who joined the Church and found hope.

EB: “What a beautiful video. Dominic, we are grateful that you’re here with us tonight with your new sweetheart wife Rebecca. You’ve thought about this question asked by Harry. How would you respond to him? What would you say to Harry to tell him why he should stay?“

Dominic: “Harry I just want to say we are here for you. I wish I could shake your hands and give you a hug right now. This Church has given me everything Harry. I remember being in the spot where I had nothing and I have everything right now.  I have happiness, I have joy.  I literally have everything. I have Christ’s name on my back. Harry if you’re really having such a hard time having these questions I would advise you to go and read James 1:5 “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God. He will give you every single reason and answer that you need Harry. I promise you that. He’s already given you one of the biggest reasons to stay and that’s Christ, his Son.“

EB: “ Thankyou Dominic. We are so proud of you and pleased with the decisions you’ve made in your life. Dominic and his sweet wife Rebecca are going to be sealed in a couple of weeks and adds a new important chapter and dimension to their life. They are going to add the sealing power of God in the House of the Lord to bind them together for time and all eternity. And then they will begin an eternal family and then you will have even more reason to live, you’ll have even more reason to persevere because then the decisions that you make, all of you make as you consider a temple sealing, and those of you that are sealed in the temple already, you have begun and eternal family that is to continue for generation after generation after generation. For Sister Rasband and I that’s six generations now. That new great grandchild we talked about earlier is the ninth generation. For some of you it’s one generation, but nonetheless the sealing power of God found in the House of the Lord binds families together, so you also need to think what your decision means and impacts future generations, so thank you very much Dominic, Rebecca, congratulations.“

SR: “If I can add that this question reminds me of a time that we will be the President Ballard and he gave a wise counsel in response. If I remember right he said “Now look, if you’re going to focus on anti-Church literature floating out on the Internet then you’re going to stay stuck in rebellion, in confusion and  disharmony. But if you listen and read the Scriptures, if you listen to the words of the prophets, and if you pray, then the Holy Ghost has an opportunity to testify to you what is true and help give you peace and understanding.  I love that.”  EB “It’s beautiful. I remember that day. I have just one more thought and I draw upon a comment from one of my brothers in the Quorum of 12 apostles. He is my seat mate to my left Elder Neil A Anderson, and in one of his General Conference messages he said this one simple sentence that has stuck with me ever since: “Will we understand everything? Of course not. We will need to put some issues on the shelf to be understood at a later time.” So brothers and sisters we’re not trying to say that we are not going to have these feelings, but they should not derail you off the covenant path. Put those items that would derail you or take you off the covenant path; put them on the shelf and in due course, in due time Heavenly father and the promptings of the Holy Ghost will give you answers to your questions along with your loving friends, family members and leaders.”

That’s all a Pharisee Mormon Apostle has to offer you.  Because he is a satanist.  He follows and teaches Lucifer’s plan.  I realise that is powerful language to use, but think about it.  In Mormonsim, satanism isn’t pagan rituals and bestiality and trying to talk to ghosts or cast spells on people.  It isn’t the spooky halloween nonsense with a horned red devil with a tail and cloven hooves that medieval Christian culture developed to demonise the pagan religions they were trying to replace, and scare the illiterate peasants they refused to educate into handing over their money to purchase forgiveness. 

Mormons have been blessed with a completely different and much more real and helpful narrative.  Satanism is believing and teaching Lucifer’s plan of salvation that he launched in the preexistence ‘war in heaven’ debates and that has been presented as the alternative to the plan of salvation that really works repeatedly since the dawn of time as very clearly articulated in our scriptures and doctrines and the temple Endowment which features Lucifer prominently to teach and warn us what to carefully avoid being tricked into believing.  Satanism is all about taking away people’s freedom to think and learn and choose for themselves and convincing them to unconditionally do and think as they are told so they never risk sinning.  In satanism your individual free thoughts are not real or important.  Objective truth is not important or real.  It’s all about looking like you are living a perfect stereotypical divinely approved life of perfect goodness in a temple marriage with children, just like your leaders are pretending to.  Maintaining the illusion of succeeding in God’s plan of salvation, but without being real, in return for handing over your mind and your freedom.  Satanism absolutely guarantees that you will definitely have those outcomes in your family life and guarantees your salvation and exaltation with no risks of failure as long as you never question, or experiment with being different to everyone else.  You just have to stop thinking for yourself or questioning the leader.  And the Rasbands offered their own family and choices as the role model for you at the start of this broadcast:

SR: “You know it reminds me of when we were just married President Spencer W Kimball had asked the Saints not to delay having children for excuses, especially like “We don’t have enough money.”  We were young, we were still in school, Elder Rasband was juggling two jobs and yet he felt to pray about this and felt strongly that we needed to follow the prophet. I was young, I was nervous about having children but I added my faith and my trust with his and we moved forward.  That’s when we established a very important motto for us to always follow the prophet. I recommend that to you. Always FOLLOW the prophet.” 

EB “Now Harriet In Wyoming, I hope we’ve answered your question. There are going to be times when you are going to have questions and we’ve got another question coming up later that deals with that very specifically, but as we begin our face-to-face broadcast we wanted to family establish for all of you the importance of following God’s living prophet on the Earth. That’s the safest, most sure way to follow the Lord’s mouthpiece on the Earth.”  Interviewer: “I think that answered that perfectly.“

Dallin Oaks’ slipped into his October 2018 General Conference talk called “Truth and the Plan” a comment that if you are thinking of controlling how many children you have, that is an evil temptation from Satan:

“I will now speak of restored gospel truths that are fundamental to the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Please consider these truths carefully. They explain much about our doctrine and practices, perhaps including some things not yet understood.  There is a God, who is the loving Father of the spirits of all who have ever lived or will live.  Gender is eternal. Before we were born on this earth, we all lived as male or female spirits in the presence of God…...The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is properly known as a family-centered Church. But what is not well understood is that our family-centeredness is focused on more than mortal relationships. Eternal relationships are also fundamental to our theology. “The family is ordained of God.” Under the great plan of our loving Creator, the mission of His restored Church is to help the children of God achieve the supernal blessing of exaltation in the celestial kingdom, which can be attained only through an eternal marriage between a man and a woman (see Doctrine and Covenants 131:1–3). We affirm the Lord’s teachings that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose” and that “marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan.”  Finally, God’s love is so great that, except for the few who deliberately become sons of perdition, He has provided a destiny of glory for all of His children. “All of His children” includes all who are dead. We perform ordinances for them by proxy in our temples. The purpose of the Church of Jesus Christ is to qualify His children for the highest degree of glory, which is exaltation or eternal life. For those who do not desire or qualify for that, God has provided other, though lesser, kingdoms of glory.   …..Third, mortal life is sacred to us. Our commitment to God’s plan requires us to oppose abortion and euthanasia.  (That’s a total lie by the way.  The Church’s Handbook of Instructions outlines several situations where it allows for abortion.) 

“Fourth, some are troubled by some of our Church’s positions on marriage and children. Our knowledge of God’s revealed plan of salvation requires us to oppose current social and legal pressures to retreat from traditional marriage and to make changes that confuse or alter gender or homogenize the differences between men and women. We know that the relationships, identities, and functions of men and women are essential to accomplish God’s great plan.  Fifth, we also have a distinctive perspective on children. We look on the bearing and nurturing of children as part of God’s plan and a joyful and sacred duty of those given the power to participate in it. In our view, the ultimate treasures on earth and in heaven are our children and our posterity. Therefore, we must teach and contend for principles and practices that provide the best conditions for the development and happiness of children —all children.

“Finally, we are beloved children of a Heavenly Father, who has taught us that maleness and femaleness, marriage between a man and a woman, and the bearing and nurturing of children are all essential to His great plan of happiness. Our positions on these fundamentals frequently provoke opposition to the Church. We consider that inevitable. Opposition is part of the plan, and Satan’s most strenuous opposition is directed at whatever is most important to God’s plan. He seeks to destroy God’s work. His prime methods are to discredit the Savior and His divine authority, to erase the effects of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, to discourage repentance, to counterfeit revelation, and to contradict individual accountability. He also seeks to confuse gender, to distort marriage, and to discourage childbearing —especially by parents who will raise children in truth.”

And in the same General Conference in his other talk titled “Parents and Children” he went overboard to insist that women can ONLY be happy and fulfilled by being mothers:

“Children are our most precious gift from God—our eternal increase. Yet we live in a time when many women wish to have no part in the bearing and nurturing of children. Many young adults delay marriage until temporal needs are satisfied. The average age of our Church members’ marriages has increased by more than two years, and the number of births to Church members is falling. The United States and some other nations face a future of too few children maturing into adults to support the number of retiring adults. Over 40 percent of births in the United States are to unwed mothers. Those children are vulnerable. Each of these trends works against our Father’s divine plan of salvation.  Latter-day Saint women understand that being a mother is their highest priority, their ultimate joy. President Gordon B. Hinckley said: “Women for the most part see their greatest fulfillment, their greatest happiness in home and family. God planted within women something divine that expresses itself in quiet strength, in refinement, in peace, in goodness, in virtue, in truth, in love. And all of these remarkable qualities find their truest and most satisfying expression in motherhood.”  He continued: “The greatest job that any woman will ever do will be in nurturing and teaching and living and encouraging and rearing her children in righteousness and truth. There is no other thing that will compare with that, regardless of what she does.”

SOLO - THE SISTERS’ DESTINY

Their other theme of living within your means and being financially self-reliant immediately gets forgotten and contradicted if it looks like it might threaten the steadily falling LDS birthrate. They tell us to prudently save our money before making expensive financial commitments and to ensure we get well educated and qualified to give ourselves long-term financial security, but as soon as doing either of those things means delaying having Mormon babies for a few years they tell you to throw caution to the wind, drop out of your university course and just breed and expect God to do some miracles and pay for it all.  

And of course the promised security and protection and guaranteed outcomes do not happen for the vast majority of young Latter-day Saints who try to follow this lifepath.  Women far outnumber men in the Church so hundreds of thousands of the young women listening to this will never in their entire lifetimes even be able to marry a worthy priesthood holding Mormon man in the temple.  If the young couple get lucky and find each other and are both at university following the one single model for our lives based on young married returned missionaries living Utah or Idaho going to one of the Brigham Young Universities that these General Authorities nearly always base their narratives on in their sermons to young Mormons, in a very large percentage of cases when they get pregnant the mother has to drop out of her course to raise the children, or work to financially support her HUSBAND completing his course and becoming the qualified breadwinner predominantly supporting the family and having a career, while she spends years in full time motherhood having more babies and often becoming overwhelmed and depressed, and reaching for the prozac which is consumed in disproportionately huge quantities in Mormonland.  They often become dependent on state and Church welfare, and are shamed for it in the self-sufficiency propaganda even though the reason they are in that poverty is because they are obedient to what the prophets and apostles told them to do.   And then around half of all LDS marriages end in divorce, including temple ones , and the divorce rate is significantly higher than that for people who marry young, and 70-80% of all the  LDS children leave the Church!  

Eventually those women, rarely the men, realise they were absolutely lied to played by this system.  They are usually left with primary responsibility for the children which the Church teaches is their primary role in life, but because they halted their education or careers to have and raise them, now they need to enter the workplace to support themselves and their kids they discover that their earning power is severely limited by their lack of qualifications, work experience and time available around childcare and school holidays.  They have become toxic divorced single mothers shamed in countless ways by the Mormon system and culture, highly unlikely to be an attractive marriage prospect for a better LDS husband because available men their age are rare as hens teeth in their Church and they are already sealed and entangled with their children to another man.  Meanwhile their ex husband can carry on his higher earning career without a blip, remarry in the temple as many new wives as he can civilly marry, continue with undiminished priesthood holding and leadership status in the Church community, and continue onwards and upwards apart from some alimony payments.   This is just one of the ways our Church culture and what Elder and Sister Rasband were selling to the young women in their audience is a dangerous and deceptive lie, and a trap.   And why the Pharisee Mormon Covenant Path of Exact Obedience only actually works for a microscopic percentage of Church members who get very lucky indeed, mostly due to factors completely out of their control, in particular the independent life choices of every single one of their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and all their spouses and children.  If any one of those people doesn’t knuckle down and do everything perfectly and manages not to be too poor or gay or disabled or lose their testimony of Momonism or whatever, the whole house of cards comes crashing down and all they have to look forward to is President Nelson’s Sad Heaven without those loved ones. 

But this is the only script the Pharisee Mormons have.  It is simple, short and utterly useless.  We need to stop repeating it and get real with our Church members’ real lives. It’s not enough to sell it as a lovely ideal to aspire to that some of us might manage, but most will have to wait till they are dead to achieve when some kind of massive reorganisation of all our lives and families occurs in the millennium that they keep changing their teachings about so even that isn’t very clear to hold onto as a hope, and it usually involves polygamy somewhere to make everything alright, which is hardly encouraging is it!!  It’s not enough when that script is the ONLY script these uber pharisee apostles speak from in their Face to Face dialogues with the Church’s children and young adults, and most of their General Conference talks.  They keep selling the same lie, trapping people in it, and the vast majority of the people who come out of that mincing machine the most wounded for life are women.  In every facet of our culture and teachings we objectify, patronise deceive, limit and treat as second class citizens the women.  

Pharisaical Mormonism is entirely constructed on patriarchal misogyny.  Christian Mormonism is meant to be empowering them as knowledge-seeking, proactive and heroic leaders like Eve on a pathway to deity and power with just as many options and opportunities as men for contributing to humanity’s  development and their own.  Without a radical and intelligent feminist reappraisal of all these ideas and limitations and practices that contribute to the subjugation of women in Mormonism we will not have a majority of female members for long.   Young women today are mostly deciding not to be the kind of undereducated, ditzy motherhood-obsessed automatons lapping up sexist gaslighting and living through their husbands that are presented in these broadcasts as role models, whether it is the teenager asking the questions or the wife of the GA. They have realised that while motherhood is a noble and fulfilling endeavour, there are ways to do it that do not impoverish you and guarantee a long-term relationship with anti-depressants, and that the world desperately needs women in every field of politics and business and academia and in every room where decisions are being made. 

In this episode I have explored how an intensely restrictive specific lifestyle involving going to university, young marriage and young motherhood having as many babies as nature will allow and ignoring the financial burdens this will place on you as a requirement of obedient blind faith is being perpetuated by the General Authorities of the Church and is still their primary message to our children and young adults. I have explored how they have elevated this lifestyle and the promised blessings of generation of righteous Mormon descendants heading to the Celestial Kingdom with you that only a very tiny percentage of those young people have any hope of achieving into the only acceptable ‘covenant path’ approved by God, and pressurise everyone to prove themselves and earn exaltation by pulling this off during their mortal life.   I have explored how in reality this pipe dream is a trap that particularly endangers young women and traps them in exhaustion, poverty and much higher likelihood of divorce while the data and common sense recommends that they secure their qualifications and careers first and wait till they and their husband are more mature before marrying.  

As well as putting women under incredible pressure to follow the version of marriage and parenthood that is absolutely the most likely to fail and break them, this pathway just isn’t an option for young people for whom middle class American University subsidised by tithe payers is not an option or for the half of all LDS young women who will never be able to marry in the temple.  The only alternative the General Authorities offer for single adults or homosexuals is a lifetime of self denial while they tell them every chance they get for the rest of their celibate single lives that the only possible way to be exalted or fulfilled as a women is marriage and having babies, and anything else they are achieving while obeying them and not marrying someone of the same sex or who cannot take them to the temple is never going to be as important or fulfilling.  This entire system creates huge numbers of second class citizen Mormon victims, then punishes and torments them for it mercilessly.  

I don’t believe in criticising a situation or system without proposing positive solutions. The simple solutions here are just to be Christian and do what Jesus did.  Jesus didn’t construct a whale culture and system like this.  It’s debatable that he even wanted to start a formal Church. He actually taught things about marriage that Mormonism totally ignored - that divorce is forbidden in his higher law (thank goodness - he wasn’t right about everything!) and that people AREN’T given in marriage in the next life, which rather throws a spanner into the entire workings of the Mormon temple marriage and promising spouses in the next life machine.  His entire focus was loving and lifting up every individual in whatever situation they were in.  Telling them they were forgiven and cared for and good enough already.  And that how we treat other people, whoever they are, is taken by Him very personally as if we are doing it to him.  The General Authorities of our Church who have chosen the Pharisee religion and inflicted unbelievable suffering on millions of Church members, disproportionately LDS women, are in very very deep trouble when Jesus gets round to judging them, and this should be totally obvious to them if they actually understood the scriptures they claim to be studying voraciously, yet instead of begging for forgiveness they miss the point entirely and in a corrupting haze of absolute power and no accountability that disconnects them from reality they devote their ministries to piling ever greater burdens of unnecessary expectations and guilt upon their followers and judging us while totally ignoring their own glaring cruelties and sins in these matters, and teaching adults rose tinted fairytales from a Primary manual as the true path for their lives.  

I have explored how the Homophobic Control Freak Pharisee Mastermind baton was passed from Boyd K Packer to Dallin Oaks like a Sith Lord training up his apprentice in Star Wars and he is now a hair’s breadth from taking the throne of the Empire and has already started imposing his dark vision for a nasty Mormonism fighting the world in a frenzy of judgmental paranoia about religious freedom and defining itself by who it hates for who they love.  He has proven that he will tell any lie, rewrite any history, sacrifice any foundational Mormon principle or article of faith and sacrifice any child or adult member that gets in the way of his overriding obsession with purging the Church and the world of its LGBTQ people and their human rights and dignity.  

This is how bad it has got and why I no longer have any hesitation calling out the crisis we are facing in our Church because of him and his false Pharisee religion for what it is.  He and his kind have caused us too much harm as an institution.  He has shattered our reputation in the world of being people of kindness and good will. He has driven young LGBTQ people to suicide.  He and his Proclamations and Policies have taken a huge toll on my family and friends as he created the toxic environment that made it impossible for them to stay or trust our institution with the care and safety of their children.  Considering how fragile the survival of the Church is already because of the exact issues Dallin Oaks is pathologically the very least able to be sensitive or empathetic to of all the Apostles, although he is already training up his apprentice David Bednar to preserve his legacy, I predict that if he does become President of the Church for any length of time it will test its infrastructure to destruction.  My prediction is upheavals and collapse from which we will have to be ready to try and rebuild something, but I hope a less destructive way can emerge.  But really, people have got to start saying No to the Oakster unless he behaves himself and makes a decent effort to channel Jesus and leave his culture war fanaticism behind, which Ezra Taft Benson surprised everyone by mostly managing to when he became President of the Church. Ezra Benson was so far right fanatical that the First Presidency had to exile him to be a Mission President in Europe to get him out of the USA during a Presidential election season and stop him causing the Church spectacular embarrassment!  If he was able to change then I hope that means Dallin Oaks can, but it really isn’t looking hopeful.  

In Episode 4 I will explore the colonial Feudal system the Pharisees have established to rob the international Church members of vast wealth, hoard it and spend it on themselves and their families and subsidising the middle class lifestyles of already comparatively wealthy Americans and their children’s university education while pretending it is poor and needs our sacrifice.  I will also explore the unbelievable indoctrination of young Latter-day Saints in the Church owned universities that is teaching them the opposite of the most basic fundamentals of education and learning in the vain hope of producing a generation of young members who don’t dare to even think they have any right to question anything at all their leaders say or do or anything about our rather chequered history, thus absolutely guaranteeing that the vast majority of them will crash out of the Church when they inevitable encounter the truth about the many things they were lied to about or that the Church hid from them and told them they have no right or need to know.