 Our last speaker today is John Ogden. His bio is really short. He's participated in a number of the MTA Meetups that I've been at and is the author of When Mormons Doubt, A Way to Save Relationships and Seek a Quality Life. Thank you, I appreciate that. We've been standing for quite a while. I wonder if you could just stand up for maybe 30 seconds and stretch because, well, this is the last stretch, right? Maybe feel into where you need to stretch and stretch there, and maybe do one big breath. Head, shoulders, knees, and toes, yes. Okay, thank you. So, I'd like to start today by talking about paradise. It's as good a place as any to start, right? So, here we see Adam and Eve with their horse friend, their peacock friend, ostrich friend, right? Just living in peace and harmony in paradise and everything is well until you can see up on the branch the serpent shows up and the serpent says, in the day you shall eat, you will not surely die, your eyes shall be opened and you shall be as the gods knowing good and evil, right? So you should be as the gods. There's this sense, there's this tension in the story that I really like. They're in paradise and yet it isn't quite sufficient, right? And I think this tension can play out in our lives day to day. We can be completely at peace in the present and yet there's this yearning to reach for something else, right? And so we move toward it. There's total satisfaction and dissatisfaction. And so we move. We want to be like the gods, right? Or to improve. And so, I'd like to start with this quote from Joseph Smith, you've got to learn how to be gods yourselves, the same as all gods have done before you and then immediately follow up with the question, what sort of gods? And I'd like to posit that the history of gods isn't terribly impressive. So, or it's made me tremendously cruel. So we have this story of the flood, God killing everyone but a family on an ark, right? The ancient Israelites decided that they wanted the warrior god Yahweh to lead them because they wanted to win wars and so they chose Yahweh and they had mixed success. They won some wars, lost some, right? But they wanted to worship Yahweh above all. They started a polytheistic but then decided to know Yahweh is the only god and we're going to choose him so that we can win more wars. The Hellenistic God is really gruesome painting but it's the Hellenistic gods ate their children, right? You have stories of that. There's Saturn being brutal. The Hindu gods, Jackson showed the happy side. Here's the dark side of the, you can see around the necklace human heads. So, it is gruesome and then even in Christianity you have the idea that the whole world is about to be burned, right? Coming in, it's going to be a complete destruction, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Jesus gets in on this as well, talking about some will be taken. He says, as in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man and so gods destroy. So, do our gods embody our destructive traits? If we go back 200,000 years ago at the dawn of Homo sapiens, you can see how we've, wherever we go, wherever we migrate, we bring destruction as well. You can see that we eliminated the Neanderthals and other species and we caused this destruction and as human population rises, we see a rapid rise in extinctions as well. We see ecological damage and cruelty in a mass scale. Well, this is local. This is 10 miles away. So, I grew up here in Utah Valley and Utah Lake. It's been, they've had problems with algae blooms and when my Mormon ancestors came here, we overfished the lake in the 1870s and introduced invasive species and we dumped raw sewage into Utah Lake until 1967. So, we might think that the things that we're doing today are going to have distant effects, but that's not so, right? I don't really swim in Utah Lake, especially when there's algae blooms, because we've affected it so much. It says that 90% of the biomass in the lake is crap or carp, sorry, that was, I did not intend that. I did not intend that, but yes, that was, well, well, hold on, Freudian slip. And so, we've been made provo less like paradise in the sense, right? Our ancestors have made it less paradiscytical. And so, we must ask, do we become what we worship? Is that what's happening? Do we see, oh, yeah, those are the gods that we want to emulate and then we start emulating them even under destructive capacities. And if so, I would posit that we must worship better gods. We must worship gods that aren't racist, that aren't sexist, that don't have bloodlust, right? This is the direction we must head in if we're going to really answer the question if we want to be the right sort of gods. And our concept of God needs to evolve, not just in what we can become, but in the vision that we have. So, the vision must be ecumenical and full of love even for the weakest among us if we're really going to be god-like in the sense that we want to be god-like, right? We're not aiming, we're not aiming just to flood the earth out of anger and vengeance. That's not really what we're going for here. We're not going for an early concept of God. So, what we are trying to do, what's happening is that more and more young people are turning away from religion. I think this is one component in the reason why it's happening, that they're saying, you know what, I just don't find that to be ethical. I don't believe that vision of God matches my ethical worldview, a racist god, a sexist god, a god of bloodlust. So, they tap out, right? They just say, no, no thanks. And the worry that I have is that there might be some sense of a god of distraction, right? We might be going from these cruel gods and saying, no thanks, I'm going to tune out to whatever I'm going to tune out to. And it's hard to say that any of these things are inherently bad, but that's a lot of time. They say that 50 billion hours is the equivalent of one human living 6 million years. You think of what you could do in 6 million years? Probably a rule of the park. Yeah, exactly. That's a life. Or what about just brutal consumerism? This is a billboard. I looked it up in snow because it's a real billboard. And it's, there's only one way to live, the Trump way, right above homeless people, right? And it's saying, Trump tower, you know, this is the one way to live. This dramatic disparity in the haves and the haves not. And just a brutal sense that all that matters is getting the most toys. So let's talk about the religion of tomorrow. And I'll stop right here just for a second to say that really what's motivating me is a personal story and it is, for lack of a better term, my own faith crisis. Just realizing that Mormonism that I grew up with is not the thing I thought it was. And it's far more nuanced and not as, not as happy as I maybe thought it was, though I still have this longing for so much of what is right in the religion. And after this faith crisis, I felt a sense of nihilism and a sense like I didn't know what to hold on to. And I eventually decided that I was going to try to hold on to three ideas, a vision paradise coupled with knowledge, transcend our past, yet include it and embrace truth, beauty and goodness. I'm going to skip over that. But the three ideals are truth, beauty and goodness. And I see these as the head, the heart and the hands, just the raw, most basic, elemental aspects, elemental virtues that we might pursue. And I might define them, actually I'm going to come, I'm going to define them first. So truth I see as intellectual honesty. I don't know exactly what to believe in terms of a cosmology or all the fine details in that regard, but I know that I can stand for intellectual honesty and that is an attitude to the pursuit of truth. Beauty being, I know that I need more spiritual experiences in my life, more profound spiritual experiences to really pay attention and be attuned to the heart and really nurture those moments of beauty and profound presence and goodness having compassion for the least among us. So from these three ideals, I can turn to these three people who talked about them. Albert Einstein said, the ideals that have lighted my way and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully have been kindness, beauty and truth. And W. Ubi de Bois in the middle here, he said that the purpose of education wasn't just to get a job to work in a factory, the purpose of education is to come to a deeper knowledge of truth, beauty and goodness. That's the goal. And Bertrand Russell wrote, probably my very favorite piece of writing right toward the end of his life, it's just a short piece and an introduction to one of his, I think, an essay. He says, three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life, the longing for love, which I would say is beauty, the search for knowledge, which I would say is truth, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind, which I would say is goodness. And then he goes on to explain what he means by that and really profound, beautiful poetic language. And he's doing this as an old man looking back, saying these are the keystones of his life. So intellectual rigor, spiritual sensitivity and compassion for the least among us. So when we ask what sort of gods, I don't know the exact answer. I don't know all the answers to that. But I hope that we can touch into these elemental virtues and ideals and have them be a guiding star as we take each step to have an anchor of sorts as we move forward. I'll just end with a thought about transhumanism and why I'm so drawn to it. Because, again, I don't know the answers, but I know the general direction. And becoming more godlike is the general direction as long as it's grounded in this compassion for the least among us. I'll say that as we move in this direction, we will find Zion and we will find paradise and it will be coupled with knowledge. Unlike the story of Adam and Eve where it was paradise without knowledge, we will move in that direction. And I'll end by saying, I believe our descendants are saying, come to Zion, come to Zion. Thank you. I think I have just a few moments. Maybe? I don't know. Two minutes. Okay. Yeah, Jackson. Okay, so what would you respond to if you were creating the god you wanted? Yeah. Right? Yep. I would say yes. I mean, I don't mean that. I don't know. To me it doesn't strike me as bad because I say all of the gods have been in the image of humans. But it's not, I don't have a good image. I'm listening for that. I'm not positing any specifics about what that god might be, but I'm trying to be sensitive to what that might be, if that makes sense. So, Carl, I don't know if you had a question? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah, Ben. Right. The dangers of not doing that is consumerism. You just default to the easiest. It doesn't have to be consumerism necessarily, but it's living mindlessly, in my opinion. If you're not deliberately envisioning the future you want, you'll end up with a future you don't want. Interesting. Elaborate. Who has time to worry about all of these beautiful, beneficent scenes, virtual rustles, spend time until I worry when you're worried about your crops dying? These are first world gods. These are not third world gods. The gods of distraction? Yeah. Oh yeah. People play World Warcraft in the third world. Yeah. I'm worried about that there's so much disparity in life's experience that sometimes you project the ideal that we would like to see and people are struggling to survive for them, a god that can come save them from their pains and travails is much more important than truth and beauty. I 100% agree with that. I would say that Indian People's Surf actually had more free time than a lot of people have today. That's a point to make that they may not play World Warcraft in this car or whatever but there are plenty of ways that people are buried in strata in society. That's all the time we have. Okay. Hopefully you can catch him after in the hall. Thanks, Tyler.