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This mini conference will have two debates, one featuring Aaron Ra versus the Muslim metaphysician, and one featuring Matt Dillahunty versus Daniel Hakeekachu. So get your tickets now as we are expecting to sell out. With that, I am going to hand it over to the affirmative for their 10 to 12 minute opening statement. The floor is yours. And you do have to unmute. All right, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It's always a pleasure to be able to come and testify before you. So in all of modern day debate history, as far as I'm aware, I'd like to be the very first to make my opening statement with opening prayer. So I'll just make this really fast. Dear Heavenly Father, please bless us with thy spirit that we may both speak clearly and be kind to each other. Let the truth be made known. We thank thee for all that was done for us and please help us with our conversation. We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. Okay, so I've got the red pill and the blue pill for you. Okay, the red pill and the blue pill from that's a reference to Beatrix, I'm sure you know. I've never seen the movie myself, but I know what the reference is. And what I can offer you knowledge or ignorance and you can just kind of go about your way. And the red pill itself has a condition with it though. Okay, part of our doctrine says, for of him unto, sorry, for of him unto whom much is given, much is required. And he who sins against the greater light shall receive the greater condemnation. So with, I'm sure you've heard of Spider-Man with the whole where with much power comes great responsibility. It's kind of the same thing with that. Okay, with much knowledge comes great accountability. The more you know, the more is expected of you. And so that's the condition with the red pill. And we're taught in the gospel of John, chapter three. For God sent not his son unto the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. So with that, the savior didn't come to the world to try and he doesn't wanna force that greater amount of accountability on everyone. This is kind of a choice on you. And so my question for you is, if God reveals himself to you today, says, Joseph Smith was my prophet, would that be enough to convince you? And if you were to have that experience with God like that, taking the red pill, would you be willing to get baptized? So that's one of my big questions and we could talk more about that when my opening statement is done. But when it comes to knowing if Joseph Smith was a true prophet, that is a really big question. And that has a, it's built on a foundation. Whether or not Joseph Smith was a true prophet because the Bible teaches that many false prophets would come in my name, right? And says in Matthew chapter seven, beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves, ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes or thorns, sorry, do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? Even so, every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth forth not good fruit is hewn down and cast in the fire. Wherefore, by their fruits ye shall know them. So when it comes to Joseph Smith and whether or not he was a true prophet, the fruit that he really produced is the Book of Mormon. Whether or not Joseph Smith was a true prophet comes down to whether or not the Book of Mormon is true. And that whole thing, we call the Book of Mormon the keystone of our religion. You think of like a big archway or something like that, right? And the keystone is the top block that keeps the whole thing together without falling down. And so when it comes to gaining a testimony of whether or not Joseph Smith was a true prophet, a lot of that comes down to inviting people to actually read the Book of Mormon, taste the fruit. And yeah, and so that's what we really point to. But the Book of Mormon itself has another foundational pillar to it, Founding Stone. In our church, Jesus Christ is the chief cornerstone. And so everything is founded on him. And in previous debates, I talked about the Aztec Codex showing human sacrifice and how like there's this ritual with the priest, he's ripping out the heart of the human sacrifice and he's taking the blood of the sacrifice and he's marking the door and little piece in the background. I think I can share this screen here real quick with you or just really, okay. So I shared this previously just showing this priest how he's taken the heart out of the victim. And then in the background here, he's got the door and the little, he took the blood of the sacrifice and marked it on the doorpost and the lintel across in the Hebrew fashion. And so I always looked at that as like, wow, that is really strong evidence that the Americans, the ancient Americans knew about the Hebrew customs. However, in the Book of Mormon, there comes a point where Jesus tells the people that I will no longer accept the sacrifice of animals, but instead a sacrifice of a pure heart and contrite spirit. And so instead of taking it figuratively, they decided to take it very literally. And there's a lot of other different evidences I can point out like this. I also, last time I also talked about the Onondagen creation story and pointed out all of the similarities with that. And if you wanted to, I could totally pull out the Cherokee creation story which I think is very, very strong evidence. And there's a lot of different cultural histories such as the Cherokees believing that they wiped out a race of giants. They went to war against a race of cannibalistic giants and that matches right up with the Book of Mormon as far as I can tell there. And so there's a lot of different cultural evidences. But as a missionary, because I served a mission for the church for two years in Arcadia, California, which is East LA. And as a missionary, we never focused on anything like that when it comes to presenting evidence because the evidence that we would rather focus on is a lot stronger than that. And so when we present evidence, what we do is we just teach about the basic restoration. We teach about the Bible and then we talk about how God calls prophets and through every dispensation and these prophets he gives authority to and to preach the gospel and to baptize people and to keep things straight because as time goes on, people get really wicked and they, oh, well, we don't really want to believe that anymore. So we're going to change this, we're going to change that and things get all scattered. And so if you look around in the world today, there are tons of different churches out there. And so the Savior likes to keep things straight and so he calls a prophet and gives them authority and to go out and baptize. And in this case, this would be Joseph Smith. And in order to find out if Joseph Smith is a true prophet, like I said, we really focus on looking for people who are willing to make commitments to pray. We invite people to pray, we teach them to pray and to go to church, to read the scriptures. And these are some really basic things but as we do these really basic things, miracles follow. And so that's the strongest evidence that we can give you. Okay, people can make up all kinds of garbage about the past. I was talking to a woman the other day who's, oh, well, Joseph Smith raped someone and yeah, we can't verify that in our day today. We can't verify all these people can make up all kinds of garbage about him but how much of that can we really verify today? What we can, what I can give you though is personal experiences, personal miracles where God shows up in your life and tells you that Joseph Smith was a true prophet. And so when we go to church on Sunday on the first week of every month, we all take turns and we can share testimonies of the different experiences that we've had, the things that have witnessed to us that Joseph Smith is a true prophet and that the Book of Mormon is true and just the different miracles that we've experienced in our lives. And so these miracles happen by doing those small things, as I said, by going to church, reading your scriptures and praying. So one of the experiences that really happened to me a long time ago was I went to just go into school one day. I just felt like this big dark cloud was hanging over everyone and everyone was, oh, shoot. Okay, so this big dark cloud was hanging over everyone and when I got home, I was able to go to my room and pray and read the scriptures. And as I did so, I felt that dark cloud get lifted and liberated, the gospel blesses families and is from the testimonies of everyone, we want you to have that for yourself and that's our biggest witness. And so I'll leave it there. Thank you so very much, Kyle. And with that, we are going to hand it over to Bryce for your 10 to 12 minute opening statement. Excellent, all right. I'm gonna share my screen really quickly here and just let me know if that is working for everybody. It's working. Good, all right then. Okay, so I want to begin just by thinking modern day debates for agreeing to host this discussion as well as thank you to Kyle Adams for agreeing to be on the affirmative side of today's proposition. So that proposition is, was Joseph Smith a true prophet of God? And I want to break the proposition down into its constituent pieces in order to illustrate why I conclude that Joseph Smith was not a true prophet. And really quickly, my name is Bryce Blankenegle. I am an independent Mormon history researcher and communicator. And just to establish a little bit of common ground, I grew up in Utah in the same religion as Kyle. So we may be throwing around a bit of jargon and some insider terminology today, but I try very hard to make Mormonism accessible to everybody. So when that happens, I'm gonna try to pause and try and define things if we just kind of happen to get into the weeds occasionally here. So let's begin with just defining our terms for today's discussion. First is a prophet. A prophet is obviously a person who speaks for God or a deity or speaks by divine inspiration. I think that's a fairly agreed upon terminology. And next we have a prophecy, right? A prophecy is something that is a divinely inspired utterance or a revelation or a prediction of some kind. I think that's a fairly generally agreed upon definition for prophecy as well. And then we also have the terminology of true. And true is, it's fairly strictly defined as something that is in accordance with the actual state or conditions, conforming to reality or fact. Two plus two is four, that's true. That is an Acacia tree, yeah, that's true. The Kirtland Temple exists, that's true. No matter how hard he tried and how much he wanted to lie to himself, the goddamn pen was always blue. These are true statements. So we don't, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latvian Saints, it remains fairly ambiguous about what constitutes prophecy and what constitutes revelation in the modern church. If a prophet says something in a public setting, is it a prophetic utterance? Well, I mean, Joseph Fielding Smith said in the early 1960s that we will never get a man into space. The earth is man's sphere. The moon is a superior planet to the earth. It was never intended that man should go there. You can write it down in your books that this will never happen. Joseph Smith taught that there were Quakers living on the moon. Brigham Young taught that the penalty for miscegenation was death on the spot. And he concluded that thought by saying, this will always be so. So these are prophetic utterances here, right? Well, we don't need to wade into these waters because I'm going to rely strictly on the strictly defined prophecies by Joseph Smith that constitute the Mormon corpus of scriptures. That is the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. So briefly, let's just go through each of these. Now, the Book of Mormon is the seminal work of Mormonism. Notably, Alexander Campbell was the name of a popular preacher who regarded Joseph Smith as a market competitor. He wrote a massive review of the Book of Mormon after reading it himself. And he published this in 1831. This was fairly a year after the Book of Mormon itself was published. And he details all of the notable events in the Book of Mormon, lists a timeline of it and then he lists 10 internal inconsistency. Some of them compared with scriptures, some of them compared with historical evidence that they are aware of at the time. And then he also discusses some of the linguistic issues noting how every word looks to have been written by one author, who he says, of course, is Joseph Smith. Another expose of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith was published in 1834. It was titled Mormonism Unveiled and it noted historical inaccuracies or anachronisms as we call them, merely 12 pages into the Book of Mormon when the Book of Mormon talks about steel. Now, that is all to say that the Book of Mormon was debunked and it was shown to be a work of 19th century Christian Bible fan fiction, just barely a year after the Book of Mormon was published. Yet to illustrate how impenetrable the believing mind can be, Joseph's religious movement based on the Book of Mormon continued to grow for the remaining 13 years of his ministry. And of course, given the providence of the Book of Mormon we have South Park to thank for properly illustrating how the book was actually written. So the Book of Mormon has spurious origins and it is not what it claims to be. The Book of Mormon is not true. Even the current prophet Russell M. Nelson said, quote, the Book of Mormon is not a textbook of history, end quote, Joseph Smith's Seminole prophetic text isn't true, this is enough alone to prove that he was not a true prophet, but there's plenty more to go. The Doctrine and Covenants is a collection of revelations primarily from Joseph Smith and this is the least studied but the most important Book of Mormon scripture. And if you wanna know anything about Mormonism this should be your first stop, The Doctrine and Covenants, not the Book of Mormon. So the revelations from Joseph Smith in here fall into basically three broad categories. There's the Doctrine and Theology revelations, there are the callings and directives revelations and then the damage control revelations. So is this Book of prophecies and revelations true? That's not an easy question to answer but the revelations that fall into these three broad categories we can kind of ascertain the truthfulness of them as we go. The Doctrine and Theology category is pretty simple. These are almost exclusively just evolutions and expansions of Protestantism that was popular in America in Joseph Smith's milieu. These aren't really true or false so much as they are just proclamations about theology that aren't testable. Now the calling and directives revelations, they similarly, they can't really be assessed as true or false because most of these are quite simply Joseph calling people on missions. You go preach over there, you go buy me a printing press in New York. So most of these are handling matters and administrative concerns as well, directing the formation of quorums or committees and various organizational bodies within the church. And most of these are brazenly self-serving but such as the modus operandi of any man claiming to speak for God. So finally we get to the damage control revelations and these are usually issued in response to a scandal or a power struggle that's going on in the church. They're also not really true or false but they are exceptionally self-serving and of course they always elevated Joseph Smith above all the other men in the church. Finally, we move on to the pearl of great price. This is a small collection of works by Joseph Smith and this is the wackiest and funnest book of Mormon revelations. This is how we know that God is an alien that lives on the planet nearest to star Colov is what's in the pearl of great price, it's great. So the pearl of great price, the first book in it is the book of Moses. This is Joseph Smith's rewriting of the Genesis story which was just clearly a fabrication by Joseph Smith's mind. Next is the book of Abraham and the book of Abraham is patently the easiest book of Mormon scripture that shows that Joseph Smith was lying about his abilities and he was just fabricating the entire corpus of Mormon scriptures and prophecies. The church itself states, quote, none of the characters on the papyrus fragments mentioned Abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the book of Abraham end quote. With the church itself stating so, we can reasonably conclude that the book of Abraham is not true. There's also the Joseph Smith translation Matthew which was just a Joseph pseudopographizing the New Testament and then we have the Joseph Smith history. And unfortunately for the Joseph Smith history, this one is canonized as scripture, there are multiple versions of the first vision story of his history which predate this account and they, the previous accounts present irresolvable contradictions to the one that is canonized in the scriptures. That's the one that's presented here as scripture. It is the latest, it is the most legendary of all of them. And I think that we can chart the evolution of the legend of the mythology of the first vision story and conclude that the 1838 version that is published as a scripture in the Pearl of Great Price is not true. So the primary thrust of my argument is that if Joseph Smith writes revelation claiming it to be from God and that prophecy is demonstrably false, then he could never be a true prophet. And each of these scriptures stand alone, provide us with enough information to conclude that Joseph Smith was not a true prophet. Taken as a whole, Joseph's entire corpus of work was completely untethered to reality which is to say that he made it up which is to say that it is not true. However, there is a deeper level to this proposition of whether or not Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God which is central to our discussion. And this is also my standard for argumentation that would convince me that my own position is erroneous and that would cause me to reactivate my membership in the church. Just to let you know, Kyle, I don't need to get rebaptized in the church. My membership is still on the records. I was never excommunicated or I never had my records removed. So in order for Joseph Smith to be a true prophet of God, my opponent must demonstrate the existence of God and then the linkage between Joseph Smith and God. That is to say, first, demonstrate that God exists. Second, demonstrate that God created the world in which we live. Third, demonstrate God communicates with humans. Fourth, demonstrate God communicates with men who he instructs to write those communications. Fifth, demonstrate those communications we have today are close enough to the original that God's true words are retained in essence or in totality. Sixth, demonstrate that Joseph Smith was a man who God chose to be his prophet. And finally, seventh, demonstrate that each of Joseph Smith's prophecies and revelations came from that God and not from Joseph Smith himself. Since we are unable to prove the existence of God in the first place, let alone the six stops sticks following steps that end at Joseph Smith, I maintain that we can reasonably conclude from the preponderance of evidence that Joseph Smith was not a true prophet of God. So thank you all, and I turn my time back over to the moderator. Thank you, sir, very much Bryce for your opening statement. And with that, this will conclude both sides opening statements for was Joseph Smith a prophet of God? We're now going to move into open dialogue, but keep on sending me in those chats or super chats at Amy Newman. But if you look at the bottom right of our screen, tickets are on sale right now for modern day debate live and in person, Saturday, September 16th in Houston, Texas. The link to tickets is at the top of the description blocks below along with our interlocutor's own channel links. This mini conference will have two debates, one featuring Arun Ra versus the Muslim metaphysician and one featuring Matt Dillahoney versus Daniel Hakekachu. So get your tickets now. We're expecting to sell out. With that, I'm gonna hand it open to the open dialogue gentlemen. The floor is both of yours. Hey, so we've got this whole structure of the church, right? We've got the foundation and we've got these things that are built upon the foundation. And when you take that whole thing and flip it upside down, it doesn't work. And so it's really important to build on the foundation and in this case, the foundation. What do you mean by flipping it upside down? In reference to what of part of my presentation? Okay, the foundation of the church is Jesus Christ himself. Okay, that's the foundation of the church. Now, when you flip it upside down and say it's Joseph Smith, that's the foundation that's wrong. And so, yeah. Well, then I don't grant the premise that the foundation of the church is Jesus Christ because without Joseph Smith, the church would never have existed. Well, if it wasn't for Joseph Smith, then it would have just been someone else. That's the whole thing. So, yeah. Okay, so I think this really gets at the core of our disagreement here. Does the church come from Joseph Smith or does it come from a transcendental force that just communicated it through Joseph Smith? I think you've hit the nail on the head. Yeah, it's that foundation right there. It's... Okay. We have basically, I structured my presentation in two separate parts. The first part is dealing with the corpus of Joseph Smith's scriptures, revelations, prophecies. The second part was the demonstration of God existing and getting from God all the way to Joseph Smith as part of that slide. So, if you would like then to demonstrate that this is indeed that Jesus Christ is the foundation of this church, then I welcome you to demonstrate that God exists and then get through all of those seven steps to get us to Joseph Smith. Okay, so Joseph Smith is built upon the foundation of the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is built on the foundation of Jesus Christ and he's the one who's really at the head of the church and leading it all. And so I tried to point out in my opening statement that... I don't agree with that. Okay, yeah, I understand that, that you don't agree with that. And so that's why as a missionary when we go out, did you serve a mission? No, I left before. Okay, so how old were you when you left? 16. 16, okay. So it's been a little while ago maybe. So as a missionary when we go out and find people to teach, like I said, our objective is to help them to develop that relationship with Christ and by inviting them to do different things and make and keep commitments. And as they build that relationship with Christ that's through the spirit that that's how they're able to develop a testimony of the Book of Mormon. And that's how they're able to develop a testimony of Joseph Smith. And so like I said, there's a lot of this other evidence out there that we could get into, but that's all trivial. And yeah, it's very debatable. But when you have your own personal experience, then yeah, it's kind of looking at the blue pen and trying to say that this pen is not blue. It's exactly that. And so... I mean, I have had my own personal experience, right? I mean, I grew up in the church, I had a testimony in the church and then I stopped believing. And then I started studying church history and I was completely convinced that the church that I had grown up in was not true. So I kind of had a slow transition away from the church. I believed in it fully. I was committed to it, graduated seminary, did everything that I was supposed to growing up in the church. Got my Eagle Scout because I stopped believing right before the requirement timeframe was up for it. Instead of getting my duty to God, I left one of my requirements undone on my duty to God. Just a ceremony where you say that I am done with the church, that I don't want this award, I don't want to do my duty to God. And that's the cut off for getting your duty to God in the church. That is something that it's basically a rite of passage that most teenagers go through in the church. Young women have their own medallion that they get for going through. And you basically have to fulfill the requirements where you give talks in church and you read scriptures and you do service and a bunch of other things. And because I kind of got to a point where I no longer believed in it, I did not do my duty to God. But that is all to say that I grew up in the church very faithful, very devout to the church. I believed in the Book of Mormon. I stood up in a testimony meeting in a fast and testimony meeting and I bore my testimony. I like to bury my testimony. I know this churches. I did all of those things. And I now recognize the psychological mechanisms that cause those feelings. And I can replicate those feelings without the Book of Mormon, without the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I can replicate those in my own life and I can have my own spiritual pursuits. That's a heavy term, of course. And I don't need the church to do it, but I can still get the same feeling. So you said you had a testimony. What miracles did you testify of? Like what did you experience? What did you see? What miracles? Yeah, did you witness? It was very difficult to come up with something offhand. And I mean, like you said earlier, it's been a little while. I actually, two months ago, I crossed the threshold of being more of my life out of the church than being in the church. I just crossed over that threshold. So I am struggling to recall anything immediate that was impactful, but it was all in lots of small little things. It was lots of little miracles. Like oftentimes people would say like, oh, God helped you find your car keys, but it was like little tiny things like that or stopped the rain when I was about to go outside and play with friends or something to that effect. Like very mundane things when I look back on them at the time were very impactful to me and they felt to me like I was being watched over by God. Okay, so yeah, when it comes to this whole thing, I really like the visualization of Christ being out on the boat in the middle of the storm and all these things are kind of going their way and going crazy and everyone on the boat is like, master, carest thou not that we perish? And then Jesus stands up and says, peace, be still. And so though I believe this is a very literal thing that took place, it's also very figurative and symbolic for me. And so when I think about all the different storms, those can be all be doubts and change and chaos. I don't know how to explain that. I don't know how to explain that. But in the end it comes up to Christ saying, peace, be still, he has to be there to calm the storms. And it sounds like for me, when I hear you, you had all these storms come up, but you never heard that. You never heard that peace, be still. You were just saying that, not having lived my life. I'm saying it sounds to me like that. And so you're saying you did hear that. So when you left the church, that's what I'm talking about, you're seeing all these different concerns and doubts kind of come into your mind out of that. That's rocking your boat basically. And so you didn't experience that peace, be still a moment that kept you in the church. This is, I feel like this is an unimportant direction to take our conversation because my own personal experience has absolutely nothing to do with the truth claims of the church. And how we got here, of course, was through a discussion about building a relationship with Jesus Christ. And you had said earlier that Jesus Christ is the head of the church. And I take issue with that because I see no evidence for that. Because, hey, I mean, there's general conference every six months and Jesus still hasn't shown up. I mean, I don't even know if they save a chair for him, but he still isn't there. I see Russell and Nelson every time. I see Thomas's Motson there every time. I see Gordon B. Hinckley there every time. I see a prophet there. I see a president or the corporation of the church of Jesus Christ at Latter-day Saints. I see men there in suits. I never see Jesus, whoever that character may be. So what evidence do you use to conclude that Jesus is the head of this church? Well, he's the one who calms my storms. And so... So it gives you a peaceful feeling to be a member of this church. Therefore, it's true. Well, it's more than a peaceful feeling. Where Jesus is, miracles follow. And it's the miracles that testify of things. And so I remember back when I was like 17 or something like that, okay? I was pretty young, but I was working out in the middle of the desert at school for, I guess I was older than 17. And so it was before my mission. I think I was like 18 at the time. I was working at a school for troubled youth. And as I'm driving home from work one morning, all of a sudden I look in my rear view mirror and there's an Indian sitting in the backseat of my car. And the moment I saw that Indian, all of a sudden my car lost total control. Okay, it's swarming to the left and to the right. And it's on this long dirt road out in the middle of nowhere. And then all of a sudden like my car hits the bank and starts to like, it's about to roll over. And then all of a sudden it comes back down. And just as the dust starts to settle, I'm able to get out of the car and kind of look at what happened. And I see that both of the tires on my front car are completely off the rim, okay? And immediately after all of this, and like during this whole experience, like I never felt worried or scared for me. It was like a roller coaster. I was just like, whoa, I can't believe this is actually happening to be kind of an exciting moment for me. But immediately after this happened, all of a sudden I look down the road there and there's a big dust cloud coming my way. And all of a sudden the car shows up and of all people, it happens to be my home teacher or the minister from our church. And he comes out, hey, you need some help here. Let me help you out. And he gets the tires and takes them off the rim. And he just happened to have a job there working. He was a plumber. And he just happened to be heading towards my work because they had plumbing issues that day. And so he helps me out getting my car taken care of and goes back to do his job afterwards. But yeah, it was just major, miraculous time. Okay, miracles. Okay, so things that happen in people's lives that they term as miracles. I grant that things happen in people's lives that they call miracles. That does not follow to the evidence of a claim that therefore Jesus exists, right? So if you are using your miracles as evidence that everybody should believe in for God's existence, then we should equally weigh everybody else's miracle claims and not just miracle claims from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, right? I agree, I totally agree. I don't believe that miracles happen just here. God is the God of the entire earth. He's, yeah. So if that evidence for miracles testifies to the truthfulness of Jesus Christ at the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as it does for somebody that a law is the head of Sunni Islam, how do we resolve that contradiction? How do we resolve that miracles can take place in both places? That they give evidence for different gods. Is it a different God, really? I mean, do you pray to Allah? Do you read the Quran and call it a holy book? Well, what I call, Father, they call Allah as far as I can tell. Right, but you don't read the Quran as scripture, right? No, I don't. Then they have to be different gods because your God does not abide by the precepts that are contained in the Quran. The law does not abide by the precepts contained in the Book of Mormon. Those are two separate distinct gods. I'm not a Muslim, but last I checked, the Muslims are of Abrahamic, that's, it's an Abrahamic religion. Right, but the Book of Mormon and the Quran are held up by two different religions as books of scripture. There was a great apostasy and there's a lot of different religions out there. But that doesn't mean, yeah, Muslims are Abrahamic religion. We are an Abrahamic religion. The point that I'm driving towards is that if you are using miracle as evidence for a personal God, that's fine. When you are using miracles as evidence for God that everybody else should accept, that that is not evidence. That is, you had an experience and none of us can verify it. None of us can do anything other than hear you relate your personal story and you're hoping that we accept that as evidence that your God exists? Why? Why should we accept your miracles as evidence for us? So I just mentioned that, yeah, the Muslim religion, we're both Abrahamic religion, we pray to the same God. And so I think the first step here because it's about gradual things. It's not just, it's here a little, there a little, right? It's so the very first step here, you said, I guess in the title of this video, I noticed it said that you're an atheist. And so I think the first step for you would just be acknowledging the existence of a God. Something greater than ourselves. I used to believe in your God. I got that, I got that. But I'm trying to tell you that a miracle, miracles are evidence that all God exists. And so be it through the Muslims or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So I don't believe in God, but I am also exceptionally lucky. A lot of things happen around me that if I were a believer, I would attribute them to God. But instead I say, I'm a lucky son of a gun. So your evidence for your miracles that you say are God are evidence for me, but when they have it in my life that I'm a lucky person. So you are saying that these, this evidence should lead us all towards God, but it hasn't led me towards God. It has led me away from your God. Well, there's correlation and causation. And I think that's kind of what you're talking, we're kind of running around here. And you're trying to say that correlation doesn't equal causation, correct? And so you can just write that off the whole experience. For me, being rescued out in the middle of the desert by my home teacher from church, you can just write that off as, oh, that's just a correlation. It's just by chance. It doesn't mean- Small community, dirt roads in Utah and you're going from work to home, probably on one of the well-traveled roads in your community. And you're one of your- That's not traveled, well-traveled. I mean, I've lived in areas where dirt roads are very commonly traveled. I used to commute via dirt roads in Colorado, right? So, I mean, somebody from your community found you when your car was broken down. That's not a miracle. That's mundane. That is one of your neighbors found you when you were in a situation where somebody was gonna find you. It so happened to be a community, a member of your community that you recognize that you had a personal connection with because they were your ministering member, but it's somebody in your community found you when you had car travel. Is that really the level of evidence that you are claiming to say that there is this transcendental force that created everything around us, created all of our existence, created each one of us? Do you see that- I said that's a piece of evidence. That's a piece of evidence. It's not everything else all into one thing, but a testimony is built brick by brick in order- Then let's talk about the evidence of the stuff that actually matters here. The stuff that we can actually use to test if Joseph Smith was a prophet. So let's talk about the Book of Mormon. Let's talk about the Doctrine and the Covenants. Let's talk about the Pearl of Great Price because really that's what we have to rely on. These are the canonized revelations of Joseph Smith that the church is structured around, that the church relies on. The church lives or dies by these texts being true and being what they claim. So let's talk about them instead of talking about our own personal miracle situations. So let's talk about the Book of Mormon because the Book of Mormon is the seminal text of Joseph Smith and of this church. If the Book of Mormon can be proven to be false, then my work is done. I don't need to prove that the Doctrine and Covenants is also false and the Pearl of Great Price is false because if everything is built on the Book of Mormon and the Book of Mormon itself is false, then we are unable to demonstrate that the church itself is true. And don't forget to like, follow, and subscribe. Send in love out there to everyone in chat, our awesome mods, and everyone at the modern day debate community. Okay, so you're trying to eliminate this whole factor of personal experience from it and trying to focus, which is the foundation here. It's our relationship with Jesus Christ himself and he's the one who testifies to everyone else. So you're trying to break away from that foundation and start to focus on other things. I am trying to get away from the personal attestations that we determine our own personal beliefs in God and I am trying to get to something that is foundational and is structural for the church. Personal miracle experiences and personal testimonies don't apply to the truthfulness of the church as a corporate body. The corporate body is the foundation. Well, the corporate body. Right, right, upon this rock. Upon this rock, I will build my church for us, that is revelation itself. The ability for you to receive revelation. And so that's why it's all about pray to know. I'm just saying, don't flip it. Don't flip it. The church is not structured on people's miracles. The church is structured on the texts of the scriptures. No, that's the foundation of the church. The foundation of the church is miracles. It's revelation, personal revelation. And so when I experience a miracle for myself and I write that down for myself, that is just as powerful as the Book of Mormon itself. If not more powerful because I've experienced it. Kyle, we're not saying mutually contradictory things right now. People believe in the church because of their own miracles, but the church itself is not structured on people's miracles, on the miracles of the members. The church itself is structured on the scriptural texts that form the organizational foundation for the church. So if those foundational texts themselves are shown to be not true or shown to be flawed, factually inaccurate, not true, then the church itself is not true. Does that logically follow? No, no. So you're building it upside down again. Like I said, it's all about those personal experiences, those revelations, the miracles, and those end up verifying the others. Cause we can argue about those other stuff all day long. Like I said, very controversial. But can you really prove that this was the case or that was the case? And it ends up being very dead. It's, yeah, you could go all day with that. I didn't live back in Joseph Smith's day. I can't say exactly how things were in those days and was this really written by Joseph Smith? Well, I didn't really watch him write it, but I can't have God testify that this- So he wrote the Book of Mormon, right? He wrote the Book of Mormon? He translated the Book of Mormon and that's where, did I witness him do that myself? Well, I can only, I can experience miracles reading it and I can have God testify to myself that these things are true. Are you retreating away from Joseph Smith being the author of the Book of Mormon right now? I just said, no, he's definitely not the author of the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon itself, yeah, the Book of Nephi. That is written by Nephi. Okay, so this is a semantic disagreement and this is where Mormons and ex-Mormons oftentimes get in a confrontation is the terminology of translator. What does a translator mean? Because Joseph Smith did not have a foundational text that was written in Reformed Egyptian that he was translating the way that linguists would be translating it from one language to another language. He didn't have that. So what is your understanding of his methods of translation that I am labeling as authorship? Well, with the Book of Mormon, we have the gold plates, right? And he was given these gold plates and given the tools. We don't have the gold plates. Well, he did, okay. And there's a lot of... There's no evidence to conclude that. We don't have the gold plates. We have no reason to believe that the gold plates ever existed in the context of what they are. Now, if Joseph Smith fabricated a set of plates, I think that's possible, maybe even likely, but we have no reason to believe that Joseph Smith had a set of gold plates that were ancient scripture written by Native American Jewish historian prophets. We have no reason to conclude that that is true. I disagree entirely, because every miracle and every revelation that comes from reading that is testimony, that's a reason to believe that the Book of Mormon is true. When God testifies, and now you didn't have this experience, but I can tell you about my friend who was a convert to the church, who saw angels. He saw angels come and witness to him. Hey! You think I haven't seen angels? That's what... I don't know, you told me that... I asked you specifically what miracles... I told you that I now can replicate the things that happened, the spiritualism that happened in my mind that caused me or convinced me to believe in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a young person. I told you that I can recreate the spiritual phenomena that were happening that caused me to believe that. So... You can recreate the miracles that... That... I'm not saying miracles. I can recreate the spiritual impressions that I got, that I used as testimony that were building my testimony, that I used as evidence that my testimony was growing. The still small voice, the burning in my bosom, when I would hear a perfect hymn when I was having a bad day that brought my spirits up, I can replicate that now without anything that's related to the Mormon Church. So it is not evidence for the truthfulness of the Church. A reason to believe is the definition of evidence. I have a hard time believing that when you say it that way that you're not loading the term a reason with a bit more than it actually can carry here. I can open up the dictionary for you. How do you define a reason? A reason to believe in something is defined as evidence. And so how do I define a reason? Oh, I just... I can look it up in the dictionary for you and just kind of show you the way they define it. Please do. Okay, a reason is a basis or cause for some belief, action, fact or event, et cetera. So... Action, fact or event. Yeah, an event. Something that is observable, something that is maybe testable, something that is a fact, an action or an event. Right, okay. So reason to believe. If I... The things that I believe in, I have reason to believe them because I have evidence for believing in those things. Okay, so if you saw an angel today and says, here I am kind of having a Paul experience. Paul is the one who saw Jesus and had the big turn of events. Oh, why are you persecuting me? And yeah, he had this whole event where, yeah, he was struck dumb because of that. But it's something like that, that would be an event and that would be a reason to believe. Right, and I've had that event myself. I mean... You've had an angel appear to you. In my mind, absolutely, absolutely. Okay, but we're talking about not like in your mind. So, okay, well, this comes down to, I mean, this is absolutely unrelated to the topic of conversation because I would really like to get to the Book of Mormon itself. We are talking about the Book of Mormon itself. As somebody who seeks naturalistic explanations for phenomena that happen around me, in the world around me, as well as events in history that obviously are much more opaque than what is going on in our day-to-day life here, seeking naturalistic explanations. I believe that there's reason to, once again, reason to believe, reason to conclude that the early church was utilizing psychedelics in order to create spiritual experiences for the early church members. Starting with Joseph Smith and the sacred grove himself. So, yes, people are very able to replicate the experience of speaking with angels, of having spiritual experiences. People are very capable of having those things through naturalistic means. That is not therefore evidence that God is real, that Jesus Christ is the head of the Mormon church and that Joseph Smith was a chosen prophet by God. Yeah, that's why I said... That just means that our human brain psychology can cause us to see and experience a whole lot of things. I agree that, yeah, drugs can make you hallucinate and see different things. And so, yeah, like I said, a good, strong testimony is built by many experiences, many bricks. And so, yeah, I don't know if you've ever been given a priesthood blessing. I don't know about your background. Yes, of course. Okay, you've been given a priesthood blessing. Have you ever been healed through a priesthood blessing before? I'm sure there were sometimes when I had a fever as a kid or something and my dad gave me a blessing and I got better soon after, but people who believe in the church obviously attribute that to the priesthood blessing. I attribute that retrospectively as, well, your body just heals with enough sleep and enough Campbell's soup and some sprite. You start feeling better eventually. So I was going to feel better whether or not I got the priesthood blessing. Okay, so you have experienced miracles of healing is what you're trying to say. If that's what you're calling it, then that's okay. That is not what I call it. And for you to apply those labels to my experiences is co-opting my own personal experience. And that makes me a bit uncomfortable. If you experienced this and then that was what you told me, so what am I expecting? What am I supposed to do? I told you that that's how I labeled it that how I understood it at the time. And now retrospectively looking back on the time, I recognize that bodies generally will heal from maladies unless maladies require medical intervention from medical science, right? And now looking back on it, I understand that I was gonna get better regardless of whether or not I got the priesthood blessing. But the priesthood blessing did happen and then I got better. So if you are saying that the priesthood blessing was a healing for me, that is putting a link of causation there that I am not comfortable with. Okay, so you don't claim to have experienced any miracles. That's it, okay? You don't claim to have experienced any miracles of healing on your terms. From my understanding of the world now, when I was a teenager, when I was younger, when I even preteen and I had my world was, my worldview was completely shaped by the church, I had no reason to believe that it was anything other than faith healing. Okay, so I learned more about the world around me and then I learned the proper understanding of what had happened. I learned the proper ways to label my past experiences. Okay, so at the time you thought it was faith healing, but you no longer believe it was faith healing. And I think faith healing is a very dangerous trend in society as well, yes. You haven't seen any major testimonies of major successes in faith healing then. I've seen a lot of testimonies of major successes in medicine. But I mean, if you, I mean, look, right? So the history of the church right here, right? This is a 1950s set, right? That has a lot of miracles in it. I mean, the Johnson family, right? Was it Elsa? Johnson, I think that was her name, had a lame, lame arm, that's how it was written about and the prophet Joseph Smith walked up and touched her arm and she could lift it above her head immediately. I have no reason to believe that that happened other than it was written in the highly propagandized history of the church. But it was enough that whatever happened in that experience caused her and the entire Johnson family to convert to the church. And then eventually gave their daughter to Joseph as a wife. But the point is that like that was evidence for them, but that speaks nothing of humans just healing from their maladies. It says nothing of just spontaneous remissions of illnesses or of cancers or whatever. That speaks nothing of many other treatments that often happen, concomitant with quote unquote faith healing that are actually more responsible for it. So when it comes to, as part of the thing I really love of doing family history work is when I can actually go and find the journals of, I don't know if it's this woman here, but that's one of the things I enjoy doing is to go and try and verify these things for myself. And so if this happened to this woman with the lame arm, did she write about it? Did any of her family members write about it? And so I want to get multiple testimonies not just the one. And so yeah, I did a series, I've been doing a series recently on John Alexander Dowie. I don't know if you've ever heard of him before. I don't think so. He's a really famous faith healer, but he's a flat earther. And so he's not even part of this church, but he's still, the miracles happen because of faith in Jesus Christ. And he's got like a whole book or several books really on these miracles that happened. And these people went to doctor after doctor trying to get their cures and they just let him through hell basically trying to do all of their crazy witch doctor experiments on them. And it was just really nasty stuff. And this is like in the early 1920s. Okay, so I appreciate this, but like once again too, like we keep exploring this rabbit trail of faith healing. This faith healing is not have anything to do with the structure of the church being based on the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants of Pearl of Great Price. And all of those texts themselves proving that Joseph Smith was not a true prophet of God. What did I just tell you was the foundation of the church? You said miracles and I disagree with you. The foundation of the church exists because of the Joseph Smith and these texts. That is not at all what the church teaches. Okay, the organization of the church is patterned after the Doctrine and Covenants. Can you agree on that? It's patterned after the Doctrine and Covenants. The organization, yeah. They talk about prophets and apostles and 70s and bishops and the priesthood itself. It's kind of laid out there, yeah. Okay, great, awesome. Okay, so what is it that missionaries hand out to people when they are attracting? Well, they give them the Book of Mormon and they also give them pamphlets that invite them to read the Book of Mormon and ask questions and talk with missionaries. Okay, so how are these texts then not the foundation of the church? If it is the organizational structure and the primary sales tool of the church, how is the church not based on these things? Like I said, it's all about building a relationship with Christ. And so... You say that, but that doesn't mean anything. The church as a corporate body has to have an organizational structure and that organizational structure is based on the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Mormon. Is that a true statement? The structure is through the priesthood with Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. Yes, but how do we know how that works? It's the foundation of prophets, apostles, Ephesians. I don't remember the... Yes, yes. And because of Joseph Smith, we have the Doctrine and Covenants. We have the actual organizational structure as it stands today with the prophet, the apostles, the Quorum of the Twelve as the apostles, the Quorums of the 70s, all of the regional bodies underneath at the stakes, the wards, the branches. But it's not the Church of Joseph Smith. It's not the Church of Joseph Smith. But it's because of Joseph Smith and the texts that he wrote that we have that organizational structure. Okay. Yes, that is the case. Right? You're granting me this point? Well, it's because of Jesus that we have that organizational structure. Okay, so I... It can be... This organizational structure wasn't established by Joseph Smith. That was established in the Bible. We're just teaching the same practices that were done in the Bible. It's called the Restoration. Okay, so I will grant. We have Christianity because of Jesus. We have Mormonism, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because of Christianity. So by a very long tangential thread, we can get causation that Jesus... Because Jesus Christ existed, we have Mormonism exists. It's because Jesus Christ exists today. He lives. Jesus lives today and testifies to the people. So this is why I structured the second portion of my rebuttal the way that I did because you have to prove that God exists. You have to prove that God communicates or that God created the world. You have to prove that God communicates with humans. You have to prove that God communicates with men who write those communications down. You have to prove that those communications today are close enough to God's true words. You have to prove that Joseph Smith was one of these prophets, just like all the prophets of antiquity in the Bible. And you have to prove that all of each and every one of Joseph Smith's prophecies and revelations, the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants, is from God and not from Joseph Smith. So we start by building the very first principle we teach is God is our loving Heavenly Father. And that is everything else stems from that. OK, that is the first thing you teach. I am saying you have to first demonstrate it before you can take your first step towards saying that Joseph Smith is a true prophet. Yes, I agree. We need to prove that God exists. And that's where the very first thing we do is teach people to pray. Demonstrate it for me so we can move to the second element of my seven strengths. OK, so what did I just... So in the very beginning of this whole conversation, I told you about the red pill and the blue pill, right? And about how with greater knowledge comes greater responsibility, right? And it's about making and keeping commitments. And so when a missionary, when we go out there and teach people, that's what we look for. We look for people who are willing to make and keep commitments because if they make and keep these commitments, then the miracles will follow. That's when things happen. And that's the secret sauce right there. OK, that's why my ancestors, seven generations ago, living out in Scotland for years and years and years, generation after generation, all of a sudden one day, oh, wow, look at this. Here's the book I'm reading. I'm having this experience. And all of a sudden, after that moment, they have this big revelation. They drop everything, all of their history out in Scotland, and immediately they leave all their family and come right here to Utah, right? And that's not happened just once, but multiple, multiple times because they had this experience with the living Christ, with the living spirit. And yeah, that's the biggest testimony of the Church itself. Let's talk about that then, right? So after you went on the presentation points of the red pill and the blue pill, the sins against the greater light, that requires a greater condemnation, I felt like that was a jab at me being an ex-mormon. You're like, yeah, you knew the true Church, like you're going to get it real bad. But you did go on after that. I'm not trying to jab you, I promise. I appreciate that. You go on to say that, of course, by their fruits, you shall know them. You quoted Matthew 7, the false prophets, the rabbining wolves, good fruit, evil fruit, so on and so forth. Joseph Smith, by the fruits we shall know them, the Book of Mormon is Joseph Smith's fruits, right? The Book of Mormon is Joseph Smith's fruits, but the greatest fruit of all is the Spirit, the Holy Ghost. So what other of Joseph Smith's fruits, what other of Joseph Smith's things that he did, can we know him by? What other, well, the priesthood. The priesthood is, I think, the biggest thing that we can really know him by. Okay, so the organizational structure of the Church. The organizational structure of the Church is the priesthood, the power to perform miracles, basically. Okay, and where does that come from? From Jesus. Okay, but the organization, the priesthood itself, right? It's from Jesus, yeah. Without Joseph Smith, arguably, nobody would be giving each other the priesthood in the Mormon context today. If Joseph Smith had not existed, the restoration itself would not exist. The Book of Mormon would not exist. No, that's not true. It would have just been someone else, and that was even addressed. Okay, I mean, so you can just say that. You cannot demonstrate that. You can only just say that. You're right, you're right. So I can just tell you my testimony of things that would have happened, yeah. Okay, so what other of Joseph Smith's fruits can we know him by? So we have the Book of Mormon itself, which is a 19th-century Christian fan fiction white supremacist man. According to you, yeah. Yeah, and I'm happy to demonstrate these. I use these terms broadly because I feel like they summarize my overall view of the Book of Mormon fairly well. But I mean, I'm doing a weekly Book of Mormon Scripture study on Arun Ra's YouTube channel, so go check that out if viewers want to see us reading through the Book of Mormon and actually talking about it and actually pointing out the white supremacy. And in any case, right, the Book of Mormon is a textbook that claims to be something that it is not. It is white supremacist, and it was written with the intention of Christianizing Native Americans, and it did not accomplish that. So the fruits... Whites were the cannibals. You realize that, right? What do you mean? The Book of Mormon ended with the Nephites being way more wicked than the Lamanites and them being cannibals. You're misunderstanding what I mean. Christianizing the Native Americans. When the Book of Mormon was written in 1830, the Native Americans, the oppressed Native Americans were the largest untapped body politic and body military that existed that was seen as up for grabs by European American settlers. So there were a lot of people who were trying to Christianize to convert Native Americans to Christianity because arguably then they would begin contributing to the European American effort of expansionism. They would assimilate and they would forget their Native American heritage and they would become more white and delights. Joseph Smith just did this in a much more direct fashion by giving the Native American groups a Christian history of themselves that wasn't true. But he did it with the purpose of converting Native Americans to Christianity. Okay. Okay, so the fruits of the Book of Mormon are, it's a white supremacist text. It was written as a text to try and Christianize Native Americans, which is colonialism. It is erasure. It is just part of a white supremacist idea is trying to convert all of the unwashed savages to their Christianity, to their religion, right? And you also call it the keystone of the religion, right? But there are so, so, so, so, so many factual inaccuracies in the Book of Mormon. There's so many anachronisms, right? Like I didn't even begin to discuss them because you've been on modern-day debates quite a few times. And with Mark Reid, he demonstrated a whole bunch of anachronisms in the Book of Mormon. So the Book of Mormon is not true. You mentioned Steele, for example. And so you're calling it an anachronism, sorry, anachronism, is that right? An anachronism. Anachronism. Anachronism, yeah, sorry. You're calling it that, which is defined as something that is temporarily out of place, something that is out of time. And so it's kind of putting a TV back in those days when they obviously didn't have TV way back in those days, right? And so that's what it means. And so you brought up an example of Steele. Nephi had a Steele bow, right? And so you're claiming that that Steele bow was an anachronism. Correct? Yes. And do you understand the issue? You clearly wrap your mind around why this is a problem in the Book of Mormon. And so, well, that's kind of addressing things from your perspective. But we're finding new things all the time when it comes to archaeology. We're finding Steele in Native American cultures. The Steele bow is actually a really strong evidence for. A Steele bow in Native American cultures prior to Columbus. This is actually Nephi. Steele swords and armor, horses and chariots. We're finding all these things, are we? There's there's many things that are coming up. And so just because you're not aware of these things doesn't mean they didn't exist. So the problem with an anachronism is it cuts in many directions, right? So you can have an anachronism of like putting a TV in a place where there isn't supposed to be a TV, right? You can also have. So there are anachronisms of omission and anachronisms of commission if we're treating anachronisms like sins here, right? So for the historian, when they are reading a text, they are reading it to see how well it fits in the culture and time from which the book is supposed to have come. So they are looking for when things come up that don't belong there. And they're also looking looking for things to be there that should be there but are not there. And so and so this is your steel bow. You're claiming that it was not there very definitively as if you have all know all knowledge about exactly how things were at that time period. Right. So my question would be why things are still surfacing. And so my question would be why didn't the Book of Mormon talk about cacao beans? That's an error of an anachronism of omission. It omitted mentioning cacao beans. Yeah, cacao beans were widely traded and used as a monitor used as a bartering commodity. Why are cacao beans not in there? I don't know. Yeah, there's a lot of things in the Book of Mormon about specific cultures. And so did you know that Nephi was a giant? No, because he wasn't because he's not real. OK, so it seems you're kind of addressing these things. This is what the Book of Mormon teaches that he was a giant and yet you're trying to address things. It doesn't fit because I feel like you're mischaracterizing your understanding with history and the way the Book of Mormon is talking about. And so because I feel like you are mischaracterizing the Book of Mormon here because it's this way with this culture, then that must automatically mean it that way with all of the Native American cultures. But at no point in the Book of Mormon does it say that this culture represented all of the different Native American cultures. I mean, the Book of Mormon by its own claimed population statistics should have been the largest Native American settlements in all of North, South and Central America. I mean, how big was Zarahemla supposed to be, supposedly at the height of its population? I'm not sure. I don't know. A few hundred thousand people. Right. The Jaredites numbered like two million people before they all killed each other off, right? Those are massive, right? What LA is like, what? Eight million people, right? You think that we wouldn't find evidence of a city from 4,000 BCE that had two million people in it? There's a lot of things that kind of ended up washing it. Like we don't know about every single... Washing away? Washing away? How did they wash away? It comes down to bones end up deteriorating very fast. Okay. But structures of buildings take a lot longer to deteriorate. And when another culture comes in after the other one, we saw this all the time with the Aztecs. And entire cities that have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of buildings all around each other take a really long time to deteriorate. And when they deteriorate, It depends on what they build them out of. They just don't disappear. They get covered by layers of sediment that we can dig down and find them. That's how archaeology works, right? Depends. Yeah. It depends. Depends. Yeah. Think about Hawaii. Okay. Hawaii has... When they're building grass huts forever, right? Are we going to find a lot of ancient remnants of these grass huts? Grass huts, not everything is so permanent. You're probably going to find bundles of sticks put together that resembled it. But if you don't find the grass huts themselves, you know what else you're going to find? Garbage dumps. You're going to find tools. You're going to find stones that are turned into tools. You're going to find evidence of a civilization from 4,000 BCE in upstate New York that had 2 million people in it. Yes, we do. We find evidence of that? Yes, we do. Please provide me a citation. Prove to me right now that we have evidence for a civilization that was 2 million people large that all fought themselves to the death in somewhere in New England from 4,000 BCE. Prove that to me right now. Kyle, do you not understand what I'm saying? Do you know how big a city has to be to inhabit 2 million people? There's been giants in the land. You've driven through Salt Lake City, right? It's like 600,000 people. Do you know how big a city has to be for 2 million people to be there? Yeah, yeah. And you're telling me that we find evidence in the mound builders? There's a lot of evidence out there. For 2 million people. Kyle, you must be able to recognize that you're being extremely dishonest right now. No, I'm not. I'm being completely sincere. Then show me the work. Show me the work. Show me the remnants of a civilization from 4,000 BCE that 2 million people inhabited in North America. I won't even geographically constrain it to New England as the Book of Mormon does. I will give you all of North America. Show me the evidence right now. Share your screen and show me the evidence. Okay. Have you not seen the structural evidence of the mound builders and what they built and the Hebrew characters that they would build right into the land? I'm asking you a question. This is Dan Voho's book on it. It's an excellent book. He talks so much about the mound builders. It is a wonderful little book. It's an extremely short read. You can pick up a copy of it for yourself. And no point in it does he assert that there's a civilization that could contain 2 million people because nobody is claiming that because it is asinine. And how many people do you claim the Aztecs were and the Mayans and other civilizations? I don't know. I don't know. The size of these populations fluctuated greatly. Yeah. It's your book. It's your book of Mormon. This is your evidence that you have to prove. You are taking the assertive position that the Book of Mormon is true here. I am saying there is no evidence to believe that it is true. There's plenty of evidence to believe that it is false. I am asking you to prove to me this one tiny piece of evidence that would prove one tiny bit of truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. And if you can't show it to me right here, then we're done. Because the Book of Mormon is the foundation for the church. For the Mormon church. That's not true. Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not true. And if the Book of Mormon itself is false, then the church itself is false. And Joseph Smith is a false prophet and I rest my case. Okay. So like I said, it comes down to God Himself. That is the foundation. Revelation is the foundation. Are you going to show me the evidence, Kyle? Are you going to show me the evidence right now? Well, I've got a guy. I can show you tons of different evidence that I don't have it organized exactly, but there's a YouTuber by the name of Michael P. And he goes into a lot more of the structural evidences out there. And you could just look him up. M-I-C-H-A-E-L-P. And he's got a lot more of the... You could show me maybe Lidar scans or something from an archaeology journal or something that's peer reviewed, not some dude's YouTube channel. And I will say guys, we have 10 more minutes of open discussion before we move into the Q&A. Keep on tagging me in chat at Amy Newman with your chats and super chats. But if you have a burning desire question for either one of your interlocutors, now is the time to do so. All right. Well, by saying, well, now it has to be going through a peer reviewed journal. Now you've just moved the goalposts. I am not moving. I am just trying so hard. To hold the Book of Mormon to the standards of evidence that we hold everything else. Okay. Except for you're dismissing all of the miracles that take place and all the things that... Miracles are not evidence for the Book of Mormon. That is false. That is false. Okay. The biggest evidence is Jesus lives and he testifies of these things. The Book of Mormon claims to be a textbook of history for the Native Americans. It isn't that. It is not true. The Book of Mormon claims to be a textbook. And that was kind of your whole thing on saying it isn't a textbook. That's what you said. Russell M. Nelson said that because he recognizes the trepidatious waters that they are wading into when it comes to Book of Mormon historicity. The church itself, the corporate church, doesn't want to alienate a bunch of its followers by saying the Book of Mormon is not a historical book. So Russell M. Nelson had to try and walk a fine line because there are so many people who have been claiming and telling church leaders for decades and decades and decades since the foundation of the church that the Book of Mormon isn't true. Now we just have the Internet that is amplifying those voices against leadership. So do you agree that a body that's above the ground, okay, that's rotting and decomposing on the ground, do you agree that it can decompose really fast, especially when there's a lot of rain and water? Sure. Okay, so if we had a million people who were just suddenly dropped dead on the face of the earth above the ground, yeah, do you think they're going to be here 200 years from now, the bodies and bones of all these people? Absolutely, yeah, and probably not even covered with that much dirt and sediment that's covered them over that period of time. And I'm not a geologist. I don't know how long it takes for layers of rock to decompose. And nor am I a biologist to know how long it takes for a body to decompose. Nor am I familiar with any level of forensics that would let me know how long it takes for the flesh to decompose versus the bones themselves decomposing. Because my understanding is that bones decompose over a very, very long, long period of time. And oftentimes they can create a hollow in a rock that is replaced by lime or whatever that creates a fossil, right? So in a couple hundred years, yeah, sure. But the bodies themselves would be wonderful evidence for the Jaredites. What about everything else? What about their garbage dumps? What about their stables? What about the metallurgy that they must have had to build these civilizations that it talks about them having? What about their smelters for the gold that it says that they had? What about... There's nothing dug up. Any... They found those. For a tribe that maps everything else for the Jaredites? It doesn't map where they got their stuff, but they've been finding a lot of... Then it's not evidence for the Book of Mormon, is it? It's evidence for the Book of Mormon when we find evidence of the ancient minings, the mines where they'd get the copper mines and the iron mines and different things like that. When they find that stuff, we can find those things. Do we find those located in places where it contributes to a body of evidence that shows that, oh, look, this smelter clearly... This gold mine clearly belonged to the Antinephile Highs, or this garbage pit is exactly weak in pinpoint. This is the garbage pit of Zarahemla, which Zarahemla was the biggest city in, according to the Book of Mormon, for what, six or seven hundred years? Something to that effect? What kind of garbage do you think they had? I can think of sewage and sewage, and that being fertilizer, it gets used up by the plants. This is how archaeology works. The majority of archaeology is digging in people's garbage dumps, because that's how you learn about people. You learn by what they did, by what they threw out. Yeah, and so I'm thinking about a lot of biodegradable material, kind of, leave no trace, kind of stuff. I'm just going to wonder about what kind of garbage you think they had, these ancient stuff. The buildings and the roads, and the fortresses, and anything else. They had those, and those things are being dug up all the time, and they're finding more and more about it, and they're finding them... You just... Like, they specifically found for the evidence. It looks like a menorah, a friggin place, like land structures that look like a menorah. That is pretty strong evidence to me. That's that strong evidence. Okay, so that's strong evidence for you, but that is not strong evidence for everybody else to believe in this. Now you're just moving to go post again. No, I am pointing out that you are making a case of special pleading, that you are granting a case, you are granting evidence for the Book of Mormon that nobody else would grant for any other proposition. Nobody else. That's a huge statement. I don't think you speak for everyone in the entire world. And so there's a lot of different people who do accept that. Okay. And that's why more people join the church every day because they experience miracles. Yeah. Okay, once again, miracles. Miracles are not evidence for a historical book of Mormon. That is false. What we have been talking about this whole time, and this is why I'm really trying to nail you down on this point, Kyle, is the Book of Mormon claims to be a textbook of Christian Native American Jews. Uh-huh. And so... And it is not that. It's not that. It's not... I think we got a freeze anyway. We got to restart. Well, everybody, be sure to take this opportunity to like and share and subscribe and send in your chats, send in your super chats while we deal with a couple of technological difficulties. Absolutely. I will say that is actually almost at the end of the open discussion anyway. And so what I will hand over to you, Bryce, while we hopefully wait for Kyle to rejoin, is that if you would like, please tell us where people can find you out there on the inner webs and what are your final thoughts? Yes. So I wish we would have gotten an opportunity to move on to the Doctrine and Covenants Pro of Great Price and many of the other points brought up. Unfortunately, the debate format just didn't quite allow that for that to happen, but this was also a fun and spirited conversation. So thank you very much, Modern Databates, for having both of us on to talk about this, to field some of these difficult questions and allow us to kind of meet on a neutral playing field. So my name is Bryce Blankenegle. I am an Independent Mormon History Researcher and Communicator. I do civilized history podcasts of Joseph Smith. That's Naked Mormonism. And I also do a current events show based around Mormonism, and that's called the Glassbox Podcast. I also do various other projects that involve things that are Mormon and tangentially Mormon related. So you can find those Naked Mormonism and Glassbox Podcast or you can find my YouTube channel that's the Naked Mormonism YouTube channel. Thank you so very much, Bryce. We are going to move into the Q&A section. I know that a bunch of your questions are for Kyle. So I'm hoping that he comes back. I'll give Bryce, of course, his chance to answer whatever he would like. But with that, we are going to move into it. Oh, here we go. He's back. Awesome, awesome. All right. And don't mind the screens, everyone. I'll make it look pretty once I get a question. Sorry about that. I told you my computer might crash on me all of a sudden, but there it happened. No worries. Not at all. Interesting timing, though. So you were saying that the Book of Mormon is not a textbook as what your last thing I heard. Well, I will actually give you a chance to say whatever you want because we're moving into our closing statements. But if you would like, Kyle, tell people where people can find you out there on the internet and what are your final thoughts on the subject? Okay. My YouTube channel name is Kyle Adams. I mostly talk about conspiracies and Flat Earth. That's my favorite thing. So my tag name is just Flat Earth, Kyle. And so anyways, the foundation of the church is that miracles happen. And as missionaries, we go out and we try to do everything we can to help people experience these miracles for themselves. And it's with these miracles, that's why people get baptized. It's because they have this overwhelming confirmation coming directly from God that this church is true. That is what I've experienced in my life, time and time and time again. And so we can look at all this dead evidence out there that we can kind of dismiss. Oh, did Joseph Smith really say that? Or maybe he did. And there's all this other kind of stuff we can talk about. All these different evidences out there, like the codex I showed in the very beginning here. And I can point to that as evidence. And there's all this other stuff. But none of that, none of that compares to the witness of Jesus Christ himself and the witness of the Holy Ghost. And that's my biggest testimony. And I invite everyone who wants to experience that to reach out to the missionaries. They're pretty easy to find. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and you can look that up. And there you go. All right. I want to thank both of our analogators for that spirited back and forth. But with that, we are going to move into super chats and chats. Feel free to tag me in chat at Amy Newman or send all of your love for the support. I'm sending that love right back. Speaking of which, the first $5 super chat from Chris. I just want everyone to know that Kyle does not speak as an authoritative position for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I would think that you would agree with that, Kyle. Is that right? Well, I am a representative of Jesus Christ. I am a member of the church. And so, but that's as far as it goes. I'm not like a general authority or anything like that. So, yeah. All right. Thank you so much for that response and your super chat, Chris. A channel membership sent in from Coffee Mom. Remember, kids, beliefs don't change reality. Agreed. Very good. All right. Sending so much love. Thank you, Coffee Mom. A $5 super chat from DaveGar for both. Could Joseph Smith be a Cassandra archetype from classical mythology in terms of his prophecies? How would we know? I don't know who Cassandra is, so I couldn't really tell you. Yeah. I'm going to try and look that up really quick. We'll come back to that. Make sense of that, yeah. Continuing on, sending love to DaveGar. We'll ask one more time in a second. But manga fan Dan for $5. If there were Quakers on the moon, could there technically be Quaker Space Oatmeal out there somewhere? I don't believe man has ever been to the moon or anything like that. I like the words of President Joseph Fielding Smith as you pointed out there where it says no man could ever go there. And so, yeah. I like the Tower of Babel example of, yeah. People trying to build their way up into heaven and yet all of a sudden Apollo and that's somehow permissible. I don't think so. I think it would be a boon to NASA to have food up in space so that they don't have to actually pack all of that for the astronauts, especially for longer journeys. Eventually we're going to be sending people to Mars. And who knows? Maybe beyond that in the next few hundred years after. So if they could just find food up there, how great would that be? That would cut back on their budget quite a lot. But unfortunately, yeah, until those Quakers are discovered, rolling their hoods on the moon, we're stuck. Yeah. And so that's one of the questions I had is the whole authenticity of that whole statement right there because people can write up all kinds of stuff. And did he really say that is one of the major questions that we can bring up here? It's a second-hand source. That's fine. Okay. Most of the sermons that we have from Joseph Smith are second-hand sources. Yeah, and that happens. And so I think one of the really things about Joseph Smith is we acknowledge, at least I acknowledge, that he was a very imperfect person. There's a difference between imperfect and a criminal kingpin. You can be imperfect without being a monster. Okay. And so I'm not convinced that he was a monster as you accused him to be. I mean, he died while a fugitive from justice for treason, for murder, for arson, for robbery. And then he had... Did he ever commit any of those things that he was accused of? And then this is the whole question. Yeah. So you can read the Court of Inquiry documents yourselves. In fact, I just did that on Glassbox Podcast a few episodes back. We went through the Missouri Mormon War and everything that happened there. And we talked extensively about the Mormon Rating Parties and the conflicts that were brewing between the Missourians and the Mormons and all of the charges that were leveled or that were sworn out as indictments against Joseph Smith. And people can make up all kinds of different accusations, right? Make up is a lot different than a court of law that he had surrendered to and was held a court hearing, right? You know, like his twin cities, Adam on Diamond and Far West, were surrounded by Missouri Militia because he had incited a civil war and he surrendered. But you recognize that that's how he got locked up in the jail, right? The big thing here is really authenticating all of this stuff. And so like I said, we can... Throughout accusations, did he really do this and did he really do that? And I wasn't there. I can't really testify of that. They're not really so much accusations when they are reading witness statements in a court of law and you're reading the actual document correspondence between the military leaders at the time. There are false witnesses all over the place. People get thrown into prison all the time because of false witnesses. I don't think you are quite understanding the gravity of what... Do you agree that false witnesses exist? Yeah. Oh, for sure. That does not grant your point, though. I don't think you're understanding the gravity of what happened in the 1838 Missouri Mormon War. I don't think you quite grasp that Joseph Smith had literally brought an entire state to the precipice of civil war. And then he did it again in Illinois, but instead was assassinated during his presidential campaign. So he couldn't go forward. He couldn't actually conduct the civil war the way that he did in Missouri, right? And we're kind of short on time here for this particular topic. I wish we could have focused so much more on Joseph Smith. I'm not a Joseph scriptures expert. I am a Joseph Smith expert. So if we wanted to talk on this, we could spend the rest of many, many, many debate time frames on just the topic of Joseph Smith. Yeah. So like I said, you can make all kinds of accusations as you want. But yeah, like cut be true in every man of liars. He died a criminal kingpin. And so... That's just a statement. According to that's one point of view. And that's the end on that very much. We're going to keep on moving forward. Because we have a whole bunch of love coming in. In fact, from Justin Johnson gifted five memberships out there to the community. We want to thank Justin and remind everyone that you can become a channel membership and get a channel member, I should say, and get a whole bunch of cool emojis out there in chat sending so much love. We'll ask again, coming back to Dave Gars, for both could Joseph Smith be a Cassandra archetype from classical mythology in terms of his prophecies? How would we know? You asked that one already. Oh, yeah. So I think, so basically Cassandra archetype is somebody who relates valid warnings or concerns that are disbelieved by others, at least according to the Wikipedia page. Sure. Look, so I did an episode of Glassbox a little while ago that was the Book of Mormon compared to the current Mormon church. Just to see how the church today compares with the actual scriptural text that it considers its foundation. And I just read passage after passage out of the Book of Mormon and showed how much the church today is in blatant error compared to the Book of Mormon itself. So yeah, look, if you want to take his prophecies, the Book of Mormon as one of his prophecies, talking about the dangers of unrighteous dominion and wealthy people taking over the world, the Book of Mormon is full of that. So sure, OK, cool. But he was just really tapping into societal archetypes that were not foreign to Joseph Smith at the time. He just wrote them through the lens of his Christian 19th century narrative. Thank you so very much for that. Another five memberships coming in from Justin, sending so much love. In fact, I see lots of love from him throughout the entire podcast so we're sending that back to him. A five dollar super chat from Big Thang Flying When. When did Mormon God, when did I assume the Mormon God, decide that black and brown people weren't evil? Was it before or after Carl Malone? Also, where are the seer stones? What are seer stones? OK, well, God never claimed black people were evil. Very specifically, where are the seer stones? Where are, OK. Where are the seer stones? I don't know about that. And so, yeah, that's kind of, yeah, I'm not sure. So that's my direct answer for that. Yeah, God loves all people. He's not a respecter of persons. He loves all people. Black, white, everything in between. All right, thank you. So I want to answer the seer stones question really quick because there are a bunch of seer stones. This is early Mormonism, the magic world view. This one is, this is the Whitmer. No, no, no, that's the blood annulate. I'm sorry. So there are like possibly as many as seven different seer stones that Joseph Smith had and used at various times in his life. The one that everybody knows is the chocolate colored seer stone. I mean, a bunch of ex-Mormons and Sunstoners have these. So that's my personal Joseph Smith seer stone. But there are a bunch that are in private collections. And one of them that I really want to see, I call it the peyote seer stone. Here you go. So this is what I call the peyote seer stone. That one is actually located in the Wilford Wood archive in North Salt Lake. And when I toured the Wilford Wood Museum, I asked to see this and they were like, no, no, you don't get to see one of the seer stones. But then we have Joseph Smith's green seer stone. That's in the daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum, I believe. And the one, the chocolate seer stone, that's in the church's vault in the Grand Mountains. So there are different seer stones that are in different collections. It's actually a really fascinating subject. So I kind of wonder about the whole thing on exactly was this one or are these different ones that they speculated he used. And so I enjoy learning about the history of that and kind of authenticating these things for myself. And like I said, going through the different records and reading that from different perspectives and different people. Yeah. You a fan of D. Michael Quinn then? That's good to hear. I don't even know who that is. Oh, bummer. Okay. And then I'd say the last word was on you, Kyle, but if everyone's got every thing they wanted to say going out. Yeah, I'm all good. All right. Sending so much love. Thank you to that response. And then coming in from Anathema, she also gifted five modern day debate memberships. We are getting so much love out there, out in chat and all of our fantastic viewers and subscribers has seen it. So thank you so very much as well as a $5 super chat coming in from O'Flamo. Bryce, how many different gods are there? If your answer is zero, how can you say the LDS God and the Islamic God are different? Oh, yeah. So look, so I believe there is no evidence for any gods. I believe that there are as many people out there that believe in God. There are that many different gods that exist in people's minds because gods are created in humans' image. As for Joseph Smith's gods versus the God of the Quran law, Joseph Smith believed in a very, very unique God. And this is actually, unfortunately, not really anywhere in the scriptural texts of the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine of Covenants or the Pearl of Great Price. But I think the most elegant of Joseph Smith's God conceptions, because his God conception evolves so much in his 14-year ministry, his most elegant conception comes from what's known as the king fillet discourse. This is a discourse that was given, what, a month and a half, two months before he was assassinated. And it kind of represents his terminal theology, his ultimate grandest theology. And he didn't believe in God. He believed in a council of gods. And that we can each be invited into that council if we're a good tithe and paying Mormons our whole life and we get sealed in the temple and we take three wives with us to heaven. That's how we get to the Celestial Kingdom, which is then granted into this council of this council of gods. If you were to talk about that in the king fall, yeah. Right. So he presented the council of gods and then I am just extrapolating based on the conception that he created. He also talked about infants on thrones, but I don't want to talk about that here because that gets way too in the weeds of super deep esoteric Mormon theology that I think is not relevant here to the question. But I would be willing to bet that if you start talking to a believing Muslim about a council of the laws, they're going to be like, what the fuck are you talking about? That's unacceptable. Sorry. What are you talking about? That is not the God that I believe in. So I'm basing my conceptions of deity from an extremely lay person's understanding of Islam and of quasi-expert understanding of Mormon theology. Okay. And do you agree that the word Elohim has a meaning that just means great leader? I mean, it's a plural Hebrew word. It just means great leader, right? I mean, or plural gods. Or plural gods, yeah. And so the king fall at sermon specifically really highlighted the word Elohim and that it means great leader and that we are all children of our Heavenly Father, which is like a pretty core doctrine there for all of us. And yeah, it's just repeating what Jesus taught, ye are children of God. Yeah, king fall at discourse is super interesting. When I did my Book of Mormon project, that was a podcast where I read through the doctrine of covenants with a co-host and actually talked about the historical setting for each of the revelations. Fascinating project, but we read through the king fall at discourse just to talk about like how wacky and how goofy and how crazy it is. So there's a whole lot of stuff that is built into it and actually some interesting disagreements among the three different accounts that we have of people who are in the audience taking the notes on it. I talked all of that over with my co-host Marie and we had a great fun talking about the king fall at discourse. So if you want to find that, my Book of Mormon podcast, check out the king fall at discourse episode. It was a lot of fun. Thank you so very much. I've got a copy of that, but I think this is kind of a huge tangent from the original question that was asked. So yeah, the original, my copy of it, it's really great and I had a lot of fun seeing it substantiated when it comes to the very first word in the Hebrew Bible, bear sheet is what it ends up talking about, which actually looking at the Hebrew, yeah, it's totally legit. And that was, I think, one of the strongest points in the king fall at discourse. But again, that's a huge tangent from the original question that was asked to you about exactly how are you so certain that there are no gods? I'm not certain there are no gods. I have no evidence to believe there are gods. Okay. So I think that's, isn't that the different, isn't that agnostic, not atheist? Because isn't atheists saying there are no gods? I live my life as an atheist. I worship no gods. That's what atheist means. And I am agnostic because it is impossible to know whether or not God exists. I think that answers the question that was asked. Thank you. Thank you so very much. And a $5 super chat again, coming in from Oflamo, coming after you, Bryce. Bryce, what is your test for divinity? That is a non sequitur because that presupposes that there is divinity, that divinity is something that is testable and existent. And if I knew what that test was or what that evidence was, then I would be a theist because I follow the evidence. But I don't see that evidence. I've never been presented with evidence that divinity or God exists. Therefore, I have no reason to believe. Well, in science, we try to rule out other factors, don't we? Yeah, sure. And so I think that was the question, it was kind of what are you doing to rule out God as a factor? I mean, I have naturalistic explanations for spiritual experiences. That doesn't seem like it requires the existence of God. Okay, so the whole miracle of just being healed, if someone had an extreme example, I like to point to John Alexander Dowey, even though he's not a member, but he's still very much a believer in Christ and all the miracles that happen. When you have a woman who's been bleeding for a long time and gone through all this kind of torture and all of a sudden, because she believed in Christ and had this experience with her, all of a sudden now she's healed, how do you rule out God healing her? A dude on YouTube is not evidence. It's not a dude on, well, okay, a testimony is evidence. A testimony used as evidence needs to be weighed appropriately compared to other methods of collecting evidence. Okay, so do you agree with me that a testimony is evidence? Okay, so testimonial evidence is one of the weakest evidences that we have. Okay, but it is evidence. For example, I mean, numerous tests have been done on this where a person who is set up, who is conducting the test, runs in and robs a store, and they immediately interview people afterwards about what the person looked like, and they give wildly different visual descriptions of what the person looked like. Yeah. And that's immediately after it happens. So testimonial evidence is the lowest degree of evidence. It is the least reliable evidence. But you still call it. But sometimes it is the only evidence that we have, and not all evidence is equal. Okay, and so for me, saying my cat eats food because I witnessed this happen, that's a testimonial evidence. But it's that testimony evidence, for me, actually experiencing watching my cat eat food. That's a lot stronger. I've heard this line before. I don't think that you are grasping or maybe you are willfully trying not to grasp that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I totally agree with that. That's part of my foundation. A cat is going to eat something, whether that's food or the owner dies in their house and the cat has to eat the owner's face because it doesn't have food. The cat is going to eat something. So that is a mundane claim that your cat eats food. Well, I'm trying to just say that there's the personal testimony evidence and then there's secondary testimony evidence. And so that's where we say man cannot live by borrowed light alone. They have to attain their own light. Man cannot live on borrowed light. That's the phrase. Okay. You walked down this rabbit trail with both, I think it was with both Tjum and Mark Reed, we don't need to explain it because they did a much better job. You stated in your opening argument that you believe things can be true. And I thought, I'm like, wow, that's awesome. I finally get to talk to someone who believes in that. He agrees with me on that. That something that can be proven true. That's great. And then because the question was for Bryce, he's going to get the final word. Okay. So this is another part of your shtick that I've noticed as well, Kyle, is your twisting of definitions of proving versus proofs and approving something versus a mathematical proof of something or a mathematical proof. Things can be true. You can conclude that something is true. For example, it's true that you and I are talking across cyberspace right now, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. So I didn't need to prove that because you and I are both interacting in this exchange. You and I can both see that this is going on. Everybody who's watching can see that this is going on. Therefore, that is evidence enough that that is a true statement. Right? I'm glad we can agree that we can use that word as true. Okay. So that is a true statement. Who said that we should eliminate the words like prove and true and correct and words like that from our vocabulary. Your misreading of that quote is very troubling to me. It's not misreading at all. So I want to see the context of that entire article. They actually retired that argument. I won that victory. They retired it. I still have a copy of it, but yeah, they retired it. It's no longer there with the Journal of College Science Teaching. All the links to it. So the article was taken down because you were using it too much? It was taken down. I won that victory. So I'm really happy about that. Wow. Wow, that is not a badge of honor. That I feel like, okay. So every rule, every crazy rule always has a story attended with it. Them removing that post, it sounds like they had a crazy person attended with it. So I get it. I understand. And then on that note, sending so much love from Cheeky Cheeky for $5. Kyle, if Joseph Smith was a prophet, why did he translate the Kinderhook plates as someone's history when they were admitted hoax? Kind of a loaded question there as to the claim he did do that. Can I really acknowledge that he did? That's a whole other question. Like I said, it's kind of going back into the gray areas. Just use the claim that you've been using quite a few times with me is that there's no evidence that he actually translated it. All we have is when they publish in the Times and Seasons. We have secondary evidence. We have secondary evidence of people claiming testimonies that these things happened. All that we have is the Times and Seasons report about the Kinderhook plates announcing that they had been found saying that the translation process has begun, but we don't have the translation of it. So you can very easily deal with the Kinderhook plates by just saying, we don't have the translation. Therefore, it never happened. I'm giving this to you. Like this is this is my kindness to you. OK. And then all right, you had the final word. And so moving forward with a super chat from David, sending love again for five dollars. Kyle, do you agree with the Book of Mormon that surely it is the earth that moveeth and not the sun? Or are you heretical in that regard? I did a video specifically about Helaman chapter 12 that you're referring to. And that's actually a hypothetical statement if you look carefully. Yeah, the earth is not moving. Yeah. Thank you so very much, David, for your super chat and for your response. And coming in from skeptics and scoundrels for being a member. Thank you so very much. Jesus lives. Where is he? Show me a living dude. Show you a living dude. Well, that's kind of what missionaries are supposed to do. That's that's our mission to go and invite people to come into Christ and help them develop these relationships. And so if you want to develop that relationship with Jesus Christ and get to know the living Christ, I really recommend reaching out to your local missionaries. Or your local Methodist group, your local Baptist, your local Jehovah's Witness. If you make and keep commitments, you'll watch the miracles happen. And yeah, you'll see this living Christ manifest himself to you. I think you're muted, Amy. Have to do that at least once a podcast. There we go. Coming in. Thank you skeptics and scoundrels for your questions, what I said. But the sinister purpose for $2 sending love. No, all of the Cassandra's prophecies were true. Joseph Smith won. Okay. I don't know again about Cassandra, so I can't really speak on that topic. Yeah, me either. But I think it is at least worth the thought experiment of like what is useful out of the Book of Mormon as purely a literary piece, what is useful out of it. And if you want to read it as commentary on the way that the rich people interact with the poor people or the way that, you know, the way that power dynamics work. Or if you're reading it as commentary on early American history, especially with the reign of judges and the Supreme Court, you can read it as that. You just need to read it through the lens of 19th century American Christianity, Christian magic, particularly. Thank you so very much for that response and the sinister purpose for all the love and support. Another, and thus I really am sending a whole bunch of love out there to Justin Johnson, who again gifted five modern day debate memberships, sending love to all of the new members out there. Welcome on board, the family. And thank you Justin for all the love and support. A $10 Super Chat coming in from Forrest Clay, he very much says counterfeiting. I wish we could have spent more time on Joseph Smith. But yes, counterfeiting is something that followed Joseph Smith and his father, the entire Smith family, their entire lives. And it was something, it was one of the charges that was against him when he was locked up in Carthage Jail and never saw the resolution of it because, well, he was shot. But counterfeiting, I mean, the entire books have been written about counterfeiting and early Mormonism because there's just so much evidence for it. And again, you can make all kinds of, you know, false accusations against him, but coming down and proving it is a whole other thing. Kyle, you're not familiar with the actual source documents, so you calling it a false accusation is kind of an argument for mignorance, isn't it? No, not at all. If you haven't read the source documents, you are ignorant about the source documents. So therefore, you're making an argument from ignorance. You're calling it a false accusation. Do you claim that this is proof? Do you claim you have proof? I mean, we have, like we have literal Navu counterfeit coins. Yes, we have proof that counterfeit coins were circulating in Navu. Yes. And do you have proof that Joseph Smith was the one responsible for making counterfeit coins? We have proof that there were members in his council of 50. No, his council, sorry, super esoteric Mormon stuff. Joseph Smith, in the last year of his life, 1844, he had extreme delusions of grandeur. He was running for president. So he formed a provisional government that would replace the American government once he was able to overthrow it. And that provisional government was called the council of 50. And part of the council of 50, it was supposed to operate as a secular government that was beholden essentially to Joseph Smith. It was the mechanisms of Joseph Smith's theocracy. But there were people who were members of the council of 50, which was a super elite group who were very deeply involved in the counterfeiting ring that was going on in Navu. Now, did Joseph Smith tell them to do it? Was Joseph Smith himself involved with it? We don't have evidence for that. But we do have evidence for is that members of his council of 50 were doing counterfeiting. And so Joseph Smith is in trouble for something that there is no evidence for him doing. That's just exactly what you told me. Right. So this is why we have Rico charges, right? Because when you have a criminal kingpin, he never does any of the crimes himself, but he has all of his underlings do the crimes, right? So if these people are members of his closest and highest ranking leadership body of the church that is going to serve as the government of his theocracy and they are doing crimes, the criminal kingpin at the head of the conspiracy that is committing these crimes is responsible for the crimes that all of the underlings are doing. Because if the criminal kingpin did not exist, though, those people arguably would not be doing those crimes in furtherance of that kingpin's goals. OK, so you're still your statement is still that there is no evidence that Joseph Smith did anything that he was accused of doing. Oh, there's plenty of evidence for Joseph Smith doing lots of what he was accused of doing. Counterfeiting, the charge of counterfeiting specifically, we don't have explicit evidence, documentary evidence that ties Joseph Smith to counterfeiting. What we have is members of Joseph Smith's closest held leadership body doing counterfeiting. Is Joseph Smith responsible for that? Is Joseph Smith responsible for that? I think a reasonable argument could be made both ways. However, charges of murder, arson, robbery, treason, plenty of other charges, adultery. We do have explicit evidence of Joseph Smith doing those things. Evidence but not proof, right? Just secondary evidence, just secondary evidence. Just testimonial evidence, so it's not that useful. OK, and so as you said, it's the weakest evidence out there as that's your terms. Yeah, sometimes it's the only evidence we have. OK. I will say we only have five, 10 more minutes left of the Q&A. And so if you really have a question for either or both of our interlocutors, now is the time to get those super chats in. I do want to thank everyone out there, including on fire for Jesus apologetic, a new member. Welcome to the family. We are looking for more people out here looking for modern day debates. From five, six, one lifestyle for $10, a multi-faceted super chat. Amy, what were you assigned at birth asking for a friend? Kyle, is there a better flat earth debater than Witsit on the Internet? And finally, where is there a space where flat earth isn't censored? I will say I am a very proud male to female transgender woman assigned one sex with a gender. But that's identity politics. That's not what you're here for. We're here to talk about is Joseph Smith a prophet of God? So going right forward, Kyle asking, is there a better flat earth debater? Might have a friend out there than Witsit. And any space out there where flat earth isn't censored? I love Witsit. Yeah, he's fellow Globuster with me. And he does a fantastic job. Is there someone else out there who can do better than him? I'm not really sure. Yeah, I can't speak on behalf of all flat earthers. So I'm not going to make any claims there. But yeah, he's he's there. I love him. The other question about uncensored. I do my own debate board where, yeah, flat earth can speak openly and freely. There's a lot of different places out there. The best way to find a place that's uncensored is finding your own group of flat earthers through the Flat Earth Sun, Moon and Zodiac Clock app, where you can find local meetups in you or near you in your own city, like they're all over the place. I went on a trip out to Phoenix over there and I just said, Hey, I'm in Phoenix. And when's the next meetup? And we got one going and there's tons of flat earthers everywhere. It's awesome. So yeah, the best way to find that uncensored place is in your own communities, in your own homes. Thank you so very much for the support of the Super Chat and sending so much love for the response from Interlocutors and $5 Super Chat from Skeptics and Scoundrels. Kyle, please give us one plausible and verifiable falsification criterion for Mormonism. Okay, say that again. Absolutely. So coming from Skeptics and Scoundrels for $5, Kyle, please give us one plausible and verifiable falsification criterion for Mormonism. A verifiable falsification criterion. And so this would be Alma chapter 32 that he really comes out and I just barely did a video about it, too, about how, yeah, faith that has, okay, if you plant a seed and it grows and it never bears through, you just call it a bad seed and throw it out. And so Alma chapter 32 gives that falsification criterion. If you plant a seed and it never grows, throw it out. And that was, I think that's the title of the video I just barely didn't talk about. And so that was my hope. The same video you did a little book burning with your daughter in the backyard at the end. That was fun. Was that the same video? I don't remember. I think, yeah, I think that was, that was, yeah, that was it. We burned the article. It was a special little moment. It was a special moment. And so, but it wasn't my daughter in that video though. That was a different one. That was the smashing of the globe that she was in. My mistake. Sending so much love once again to everyone out there for all the love and support. Another $5 super chat from big thang flying when testimony is the lowest form of evidence and is thrown out when any other evidence conflicts. Feelings aren't facts, but they are in church. Testimony. Well, there's secondary testimony listening to other people. And then there's the personal testimony. And so me witnessing for myself, my cat eating food is pretty strong. You know, that's witnessing it for yourself. You don't throw that out. If that's like foundational right there. If it's something that you actually observe for yourself. Nothing else compares to that. And so if like a hundred people say, no, this never happened, but you saw it for yourself, then yeah, you're going to throw everyone else out and say this happened. You probably hallucinated. And you sense this can deceive, right? Your senses can deceive you. Your senses can deceive you. Yes. Yeah. So if your senses lead you to conclude something that a hundred other people are concluding the opposite, what is more likely that all 100 people are wrong or that one person is wrong? I feel like you're making an ad popular argument there. Well, okay, but okay, so if we're talking about, okay, so let's let's provide an example. You're standing in a crowd of 100 people. You're the 101st person in a crowd of 100 people. You see a UFO touched down in the center of the group and drop a cat out of it that drops down and then runs up and rubs up against your leg and then goes back up in the UFO and then it flies away. But all of the other 100 people did not see that. Who is what is more likely that all 100 people are deluded or that one person is deluded? Um, exactly what is likely and what is not likely. I don't like to to put numbers on something that can't be this is why we say that witness testimony is the first to get thrown out because witness testimony is inherently the least reliable form of evidence, but it is a form of evidence, right? Okay. So because people senses can fail them, memory is exceptionally fickle and exceptionally hard to deal with, especially remembered conversations, especially years and years after the fact. I agree. Yeah. So right, like so in like people can also just be delusional. People can hallucinate all sorts of things. So you continue to hold up witness testimony as evidence for the Book of Mormon when there are mountains of circumstantial and documentary evidence that prove that it isn't what it is. But on the other hand, you're saying, but I have all of this millions of people saying that they have a testimony Book of Mormon is true. Okay. Well, a million testimony saying it's true get immediately thrown out as soon as we find one anachronism in the book, one anachronism totally borks an entire book of history. I very much disagree because we're finding more things show up all the time about metallurgy that we didn't know about before. And so our knowledge of history is we're finding we're finding chariots in North America, chariots and steel swords and shields and armor because you haven't found it or just because you're not aware of any of that yet doesn't mean they don't exist. All right. No, tell me tell you what, you hold your breath. I will not. Let's see who ends up being vindicated for evidence for the Book of Mormon. That was one of the interesting things is finding the boomerang. I think it was in Chichen Itza, if I'm not mistaken, finding the boomerang over there. And yeah, there's a lot of really interesting ancient technology that, you know, the ancients weren't caved in there. There weren't just a bunch of stupid idiots or anything like that. But they had a lot living and interacting in the world that they that they have using the tools that they have to understand the world around them. And now we have a lot better tools. We have much better ways of observing the world around us. And yet you're rejecting our modern observations for observations of those people. There's a lot that we're still learning about. And we're finding out more and more that the ancients were far more advanced than than today we give them credit for. Okay, but the Book of Mormon manifest destiny specifically earlier, and you're totally condemning it, right? But a lot of that manifest destiny is kind of the thing that's the very thing that's describing all the ancients as a whole bunch of stupid idiots. And oh, they didn't know anything. And so we, we don't want to describe them as being anything advanced and intellectual or anything like that. They're just a bunch of savages, right? And so that's one of the big things about the Book of Mormon is it's actually saying these are not just a bunch of, you know, stupid savages, but they're a lot more advanced than people give them credit for. And so it's pretty, pretty rich for you to say that I am utilizing manifest destiny and what I say, I'm glad you're the one who claims the book of very strong and potent. I'm sorry, when you are the one claiming the Book of Mormon, a text of 19th century white supremacy American expansionism as a Book of Scripture. And then, Kyle, you have the last sentence, but please not a question, because then we're going to go on to another question for you. There. Okay. The ancients for far more advanced than a lot of people give them credit for. I already said that. So, yeah, you can go on. That's all right. And these are going to be the last few super chats. I think even if they start to come in now, because we want to respect our allocators times, we're so thankful they came on. And so a $5 super chat from Faris Clay, he created the illegal bank in the Kirtland safety society where they printed the counterfeit money. Okay. I haven't seen that evidence saying that for a lot of this stuff. So, yeah, when you can bring that evidence, we could talk about that. Very, very quick clarification. Testimonial evidence is evidence. And so, yeah, I haven't seen that record. This is something that comes up in Mormon stuff a whole lot. But I mean, you can see it on the cover of this, right? So, that's a Kirtland safety society bank note right there. A lot of ex-mormons will say that this was counterfeit money. It was not counterfeit money. It was their money. We understand money today is the greenbacks. That's a product of the Civil War. It was far more common for banks to print notes and that they would have the specie on hand and we would exchange those notes for each other back and forth. And that also came in the form of promissory notes. So, the Kirtland safety society was a bank that applied for a bank charter and didn't get it. And then they changed their name to an anti-banking society and just printed their own notes. But it was not counterfeit. Counterfeit was far more prevalent in Nauvoo where they were actually making fake coins. So, that's bogus. Counterfeit is paper money, bogus is coins. They were making counterfeit money in Nauvoo. Kirtland safety society was specifically they were making society bills of their own. Thank you for that. Coming after you, Bryce, $5 Super Chat from Chris. Bryce, is there any evidence that Joseph Smith taught the earth was a sphere? He, there's second hand evidence that he talked about ancient Jews living in a hollow center of an earth. But he describes the migrations of the natives through the Book of Mormon through what I interpret through a lens of a globe earth. I see no evidence that Joseph Smith ever taught a flat earth or ever believed in a flat earth because I think that it was far more prevalent consensus back then that globe earth was it because he was living on the other side of the globe that was still a novel thing for a lot of people in the 1800s. It was still understood to be the New World. That's, you know, that's kind of fallen out of vogue of our terminology today, but America was still seen as the New World. They were living on the other side of the globe but that Columbus so bravely set sail across in 1492. Thank you so very much for that response and for that Super Chat, Chris. Another from skeptics and scoundrels coming after you for $5, you really need to learn what verifiable falsification criterion for Mormonism actually means. Care to try again? I think I did a good job before so just saying you need to understand that's just yeah trying to so I mean what I said but what would convince you what would convince you right like I built into my presentation what would convince me that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God that was the whole entire second portion of my presentation what would convince you Joseph Smith is not a true prophet that's all it is. What would convince me that Joseph Smith was not a true prophet and so that's kind of like shaking like the foundation kind of like pulling yeah you've got to actually it's kind of like the the the flat earth what would convince me that the earth isn't flat and so if you want to address that you actually have to address the actual evidences that I've actually established and so kind of like hearing me out on the different things and so okay so no it's not about other people understanding things that you're saying it's about you understanding things other people are saying what is the thing that somebody could say that could convince you otherwise. What is something that someone else could say that would convince me otherwise? Yes or what fact could you learn that would prove that Joseph Smith is a false prophet? Well like I said the foundation is in revelation and so it would have to be like a direct revelation from God that comes out and says no this is not true and so I think that's what it really would come down to. Okay I mean there's the the church of Christ right the church of Christ believes that Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet when he first changed the name in 1834 they're the ones who hold the temple lot in Missouri right they they believe that Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet right so they have the revelation that says that this is that he is not a true prophet anymore and that's why I haven't had that experience and so that's why I'm where I am and they are where they are so it would have to be a feeling it would have to be a feeling that is as powerful for you that confirms the Book of Mormon is true that would it would have to be that powerful same magnitude of that feeling that would prove that the Book of Mormon is false. It's not necessarily a feeling because there's different witnesses that you know that's there's a lot more than just one sense there's multiple senses that can confirm things and so yeah just just one sense is kind of a in dreams you can experience like one sense at a time but there's a difference between being asleep in a wake and that is when multiple senses are engaged and activated and so in my when I'm asleep I can't I might be able to smell something but that doesn't mean I can touch something at the same time and taste something at the same time and there's all these other senses that are alive and so when it comes to waking up that's when you start to try to engage your other senses and as you try to engage your other senses that ends up triggering a wake up response and when you start to think about things deeper and so yeah okay so but it is all still internal right so I'm sorry Amy just just I wanted to chase this just a little bit further so but it is all still internal right it is your senses it is what you're experiencing it is your so what external evidence what is your criterion for proving that Joseph Smith is not a true prophet what is your external evidence that you would have to take in from the outside world that would have to go into your brain what is that evidence that is exactly what I'm talking about and just saying like all of our senses are for well almost all are for examining external things except for like hunger maybe that's like a sense of something internal but the the main senses that we think about are for examining external factors right yes and so yeah so that's kind of what I'm talking about and so revelation itself right but there's there are there are internal factors when it comes to revelation but there's also external factors involving revelation so I gave that example of the car accident and seeing the the ghost in my backyard in my backseat in my car and you know that whole miracle that was an external factor okay and all right we only have two super chats left I have one for each of you I do want to again send all the love right back to everyone who's supporting the channel but a ten dollar super chat again from Chris Brice how do you determine whether a statement was factual or if he was just saying something to test to see if people believed it just because Joseph Smith said it Quakers for example the question yeah so how do we determine when Joseph Smith is saying something whether he was saying it and teaching it or whether he was just trying to test people honestly that if I'm understanding the question appropriately I think that gets super deep into Joseph Smith psychology and that's a that's a world in a dark and scary place that I'm not very comfortable speculating in because really at the end of the day it's it's a matter of how cynical you view Joseph Smith and how cynical he was how much of what he did was pushing the envelope seeing what he could get away with how much was truly fueled by his narcissism for ever-growing power or how much was just truly he believed it deep down internally there is no bedrock on this because you're trying like you can't get into somebody else's head let alone the head of somebody who's been dead for 170 years right so I don't I I'm not trying to dodge the question I'm just saying I can't answer it because it's just I don't I can't I can't do it you're muted you're muted Amy there we go thank you so very much I like doing a bent trillicus trick and that is I see you in chat oh flammo I think we did cover it but if not send it into me just right now and we'll re cover it as soon as Kyle has his last super chat we'll do we'll do uh an extra credit scene as if we're Marvel and so a question coming in from skeptics and scoundrels Kyle please give us oh do do do do sending so much love to them but coffee mom all evidence of Jesus is secondhand testimony no that's not well if it's coming from someone else it is but the the evidence that I got for myself that's not secondhand testimony that is personal experience you know when I'm able to pray and get answers to my prayers that is first hand testimony not secondhand testimony and so I go I go back to um man cannot live on borrowed light they they need to attain their own personal testimonies and have their own experiences and yeah that's the the miracle of of this of the of the gospel that's that's how the church works it does not work without the miracles and all right I'm trying to see if o flammo would tag me because I want to make sure that I got everyone's super chats sent in but I think with that I we're going to send love out there oh here we go Bryce saying humans created gods and also saying no gods existed is a contradiction did you know that okay so people imagining things doesn't actually create them beyond just their imagination so I play dnd a couple times a week um but what happens in those worlds is only actually happening in our imaginations and I believe that the gods that humans make are in our imaginations um and then we teach those imaginative things to each other and then more people begin to imagine the same thing as other people or what they think is the same as other people and pretty soon you have a religion so just by virtue of people believing in something doesn't make it true but it just so happens that um so many times the conception of deity that people create often in reflects the um their own personal desires their own internal psychology or they oftentimes will glom on to religions that reflect their own personal beliefs and as an example of this when the church decided to um cease discriminating against black people because of their skin color in 1978 uh there was a contingency of extremely conservative Mormons who left the church because they believed sincerely that black people could never get into heaven and that the church was now in error because they were now allowing black people into heaven so those people clearly had their conception of god their conception of a white supremacist deity in their mind and when the church wandered too far away from that those people said i'm gonna find a new religion or create my own religion that is more like the god that i am imagining in my mind so gods cannot exist at the same time that people can imagine that gods do exist those are not contradictory and so kyle i'll let you know you're muted amy you're muted on once again third time is the shark still muted on zoom there we go there we go but i wanted to say in essence that kyle you can have a response back but then brice has to have the last word as it was his question but these are both of your last words for both of you okay uh well i already said that uh the the magic sauce with with the the church the the way it functions is through miracles and so uh it doesn't just stop with the book of Mormon but god still speaks today and still performs miracles today uh it's he's a god that lives and the most amazing thing for me that i'm trying to to do with my family is to have a collection just like the book of Mormon was written about one person writing their testimonies and and their experiences with god uh it's a really cool thing when we can have that generational and so uh with my parents and them writing their experiences and then i write my experiences and i am able to do that with my own children and have encouraged them to write their experiences that is way more meaningful to me uh because it's much more personal it's applying to us and so yeah that's the way the bible was written and that's yeah the way the book of Mormon was written and it doesn't have to just end there but it can continually go this is a story that is still being told and then brice the final word is yours but the questions are over yeah um miracles are i i believe that uh what this represents and made clear throughout the entire exchange today is that kyle is elevating uh miracles as uh evidence above uh basically anything else that we could possibly have access to any other forms of evidence and i think that's just the wrong way to look at reality and that leads people to conclude and believe all sorts of really unbelievable untestable just credulous nonsense in the world and i believe that that my interlocutor has uh represented um exactly what that leads to today thank you so very much to both of our interlocutors with that i am going to send love to everyone for joining us tonight as we had brice and kyle go head to head i do want to thank all the people in chat our fantastic mods and most importantly you our audience here on modern day debate we are a neutral platform welcoming everybody from all walks of life so if you're looking for even more fantastic debates we're all over the internet including your favorite podcasting platforms apple spotify google podcasts and if you enjoy the show then please don't forget to like follow and subscribe it helps us reach an even wider audience viewers like you there will also be an open mic after show on my channel amy newman on the youtube's however if you've ever thought of running your own after show feel free to reach out to us here at modern day debate because we support all sides including yours plus it we're always looking for new debaters so come on down to the ring but if you heard anything that was of interest to you tonight on our debate of was joseph smith prophet of god with our fantastic debaters brice and kyle well then why not check all of our guest links which are in the description below though if you're looking for more fun back and forth 24 7365 feel free to check out our mdd discord also in the description and in chat which often throws after parties along with more online fun finally tickets are on sale now for modern day debate live and in person for saturday september 16th in houston texas the link of which is at the top of this box right below this mini conference will have two debates one featuring are in raw versus the muslim metaphysician and one featuring matt dillahoney and daniel huck kikachu so go get your tickets now as we're expecting to sell out with that i am amy newman with modern day debate and we hope you continue having great conversations discussions and debates good night everyone