More Mormon Exaltation Dilemmas, Pt. 3 (w/ Aaron Shafovaloff)

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Hey, fireflies. Welcome back to Outer Brightness from Mormon to Jesus. This week, we are bringing you our third and final installment of our conversation with Aaron Shaffa Wallace. We had him on to discuss his article, Dilemmas of Mormon Exaltation. And in this installment, we cover a number of dilemmas that he has documented but not yet written into article form. We hope you enjoy this final installment with Aaron. Give us a shout out if you like it. Feel free to join the Outer Brightness Facebook group and discuss the episode with other listeners.

Thank you. Another one is that if I call it the rookie problem, if you have a baseball team, there's always somebody on the baseball team that's the least experienced. He's rookie. If you have the Mormon universe where all these people are becoming gods, there's always one person who has least been at it. Either the Brigham model where all the gods are always progressing in all their attributes, in that model, you have at least one god who's at the bottom of the escalator, who's recently exalted as a god, and yet relative to all the gods outside of himself is the least glorious. Or if you're using the modern dominant LDS model of external progression in your dominion expansions, there's always one deity who has, because he's cat out of his start, he starts incrementally one, two, three, four, five. There's always one deity there who has the least amount of dominion among all the gods. So you have an either dominant Mormon model, either of the major models, you have a least high of all the gods who is supposedly supposed to be called by his spirit children, the most high.

So you have the most rookie, most junior, most freshmen, least high god. That's a problem. And his spirit kids are supposed to say, dad, you're the most high of all the gods. Another problem is you have a god who's been exalted for like two minutes. And I know some Mormons kind of play with language here and they say, well, as soon as the god is exalted, he, you know, becomes without time.

That's nonsense. If you, if you are exalted and you sequence toward progress, toward increment, toward exaltation, there was a time that you were not god. And there's a time where you were exalted as god. Well, like two minutes after exaltation, supposedly this god is supposed to be able to say, I have been the most high god from all eternity to all eternity.

Marana 818, I have been unchangeable, the same god from all eternity to all eternity. So that this is the dilemma of, of, of fairly inexperienced. Well, a god who's, you know, who's just arrived on the scene is telling everyone he's always been god. Um, I think like a kid saying, you know, my dad could beat up your dad. You know, my, my god is greater than your god. And, and yeah, well, like if you're the child of god, you know, after he's progressed a little while, you know, it would seem like you inherit more rather than, you know, if you're the child of a rookie god, he doesn't really have much to leave to you to inherit.

So there's all kinds of things that go along with that. He at least doesn't have as much as others. And, you know, how do we know our God isn't the most junior of all the exalted gods?

It's kind of like, do you want to go to the doctor that just squeaked his way out of medical school? Or, I mean, they can say, well, he's learned enough to be, you know, completely been a capable benefactor to us. Okay, well, grant that for just sake of argument, he's still the least of all the gods.

He's still relative to all the other gods, the least experienced divine doctor. Yeah. And then there's the LDS Holy Ghost who's even further down the ladder.

Yeah. And these, these guys sort of like, they achieve this sort of pre-exaltation godhood. They kind of circumvent the system. They're able to achieve something.

They hack, they're like a, they're like giant, like they hacked the system. And so it really raises the question of if, if, if Jesus, for example, is the firstborn, some, some Mormons take that as chronological firstborn, some, you know, treat it differently. But if, if Jesus was able to become God in some significant, meaningful sense prior to his incarnation, how was he able to do that and not us? Right. And if you really dig deep, you think, oh, well, Mormons will say that those who die in infancy, a lot of Mormons will say this, it's not universal, but we'll say, well, they're guaranteed exaltation.

Well, why? Well, because they sufficiently proved their worthiness and pre-mortality. So you're saying there's some subset of spirits and pre-mortality that were good enough not to live out a full human existence. They didn't need, they just need to kind of get a body for two minutes and die and, and they, and they're good.

And they're, they're, they're, their future is secured. So there's some subset of spirits and pre-mortality that given enough time were able. And so you really have a two track model there. It's really not, you, you, you've really got different paths essentially to, to Godhood there. And you have these gods who were able to do it without sinning. We'll talk about that in a second and the gods who, who weren't.

And so you really have a, I guess I'll just expand on that real quickly. And this is one of my, this is the dilemma I've pressed more than any others in other contexts. I've got godneversinned.com and I've asked was heavenly father once perhaps a sinful mortal before he was exalted as a God. Was heavenly father perhaps once a sinful mortal before he was exalted as a God in light of as man as God once was, as God as man may be. And about one third of Latter-day Saints will say no. And two thirds of Latter-day Saints say either yes or probably or maybe or who knows, doesn't matter that kind of thing. They won't confidently say that heavenly father was, was not a sinner.

And so you have this dilemma of, well, if, if, if we can become gods and we're sinners, how do we know heavenly father? Wasn't one of the sinners that became a God. And some Mormons will say, well, maybe he was more like Jesus. Well, there's different Latter-day Saint approaches to John five 19. You know, there's different BYU professors that have different positions on how you interpret John five 19 in light of King's fault discourse, but whatever the case, if you're, if you're affirming that some gods were once sinners and other gods weren't, you have a two tier, you have a, you have, you have, you know, it's like some gods have a better resume than others. It's like, well, my deity never sinned. What kind of deity did you all get at other domain in the Mormon multiverse? Well, our God used to be a sinner and receive the blood of a different savior. And so you've got this problem of, of a superior and inferior deity resumes. You've also got the problem.

It's really interesting. Mormonism seems to promote this idea. Well, if you really extrapolated outward, it's like every generation of the gods has a firstborn son who doesn't sin and who then plays out his mortal life. And in this repeats, well, it's almost like there's a special class of deities.

And some Mormons think our heavenly father is a kind of part of this premier Royal special subset line of sinless saviors, that it's an elite squad of deities that never sinned and they played the role of a sinless savior, but others that become gods, it's almost like they grant others graduated to godhood, but not, how do you say it? The, when you get special honors, um, come loud. Yeah, there you go.

Come loudy soon to come out. Yeah. It's like some deities graduated with special honors and some didn't, um, can, if I become an exalted God, can I, uh, have access to other deities other than my direct superiors? Do I live in a community with other deities? Is there like a, is there like a guild or, you know, do I have relational access to deities that are prior to my deity? So can I go visit my spirit uncles or heavenly great grandfather? Well, if I, if I am at the feet of my heavenly great grandfather, can I learn from him? Can I, can I derive knowledge and power and giftings and glory from having the great grandfather and not directly from heavenly father? Or can I, can I get that kind of benefit from some spiritual cousin out there if I'm living in the community with all the gods. And so you have this problem where like you're, you're, you're receiving some sort of goodness into you that didn't come, not even directly from heavenly father in that model, or you're having to say that there's some sort of hermetically sealed relational boundary where you're only allowed to get the good things that you get from your direct ancestor that you can go visit your, your spirit uncle in heaven, but you're not allowed to receive any gifts or benefits or knowledge and power from him. Otherwise, you know, heavenly father doesn't have the right to claim that all good things to you were from him. Yeah.

And there's related to that. There's, there's the dilemma that, you know, if, if exaltation in the highest level of the celestial kingdom is the best there is, right, but you are able to go and sit at the feet of your heavenly grandfather and learn from him. What, what could you conceivably learn from him that you would not already have?

And if you could conceivably learn from him something that you would not already have as an exalted God in the highest level of the celestial kingdom, then the highest level of the celestial kingdom is not the best that there is. Yeah. And a lot of this is presupposing like a Brigham model, Brigham might model of all the gods are always progressing and all of their attributes.

Yeah. That's, that's kind of what I was going to say is that I like thinking back to when I was an LDS, I'd probably say, well, you know, when we reached the status of an exalted being, we'll, we'll have all knowledge and, you know, just like God does. And so there's not really anything left to learn per se. So, you know, maybe that's how a lot of Latter-day Saints would answer. If you go that route, if you say that you max out on all your internal attributes, that all the exalted gods are equal in all of their internal attributes, then you have to deny that we eternally progress in the sense that most matters.

And you have to agree, you have to concede that the classical Christians have a more robust, eternal progression than Mormons do, because we have available to us the infinitude of God from which to draw, you know, a benefit. You also have the question of who you might say incubates or collects or organizes all the pre-spirit intelligences. Is there some sort of governing authority? Is there, you know, is there some like, you know, I'm not sure what a good analogy for this is. I'm thinking of like, like sci-fi movies right now, but the time variance authority from Loki. Yeah.

Yeah. Is there some sort of like council of the gods that is deciding, and we mentioned this earlier, the matchmaking sort of adoption matchmaking services between intelligences and the spirit couples or polygamous units that adopts intelligences for the bequeathing of a spirit body. If the matchmaker connects individual intelligences with the gods, if there is a matchmaker, then it really raises the question of, well, why aren't we worshiping the matchmaker? That sounds like he's, it sounds like he's got a supremacy that the other deities don't. If there's no particular matchmaker, and if there's no necessary reason why the matchmaker, the match, the matches happen the way they happened, then you have to say that the matches between particular deity units, godheads or nuclear family deity units or polygamous unions or pairs that they got matched up with certain intelligences, it becomes accidental random. It's like, Oh, you, you heavenly father rolled the dice and he got you. And that doesn't sound very loving or personal.

We mentioned proportionately infinitesimal infinitesimal domain. So I'll skip that. There's the question of whether the gods are, if they're in the Brigham model, if they're still progressing in the attributes that most matter, do they learn at different rates? So if Matthew and I both become gods and I like start out ahead of Matthew, can Matthew sort of catch up to me? Can he accelerate faster than I do in his progression?

Matthew definitely would, but I would not. So if there's different rates of progression and if you can kind of decelerate and accelerate a different rates of progression, or even if you take the external progression model of dominions and then you start asking, can you go do you necessarily have to expand your own dominion through what's directly given to you from heavenly father? Or can you go and get and collect from the chaotic multiverse and expand your own universe? Well, if there's different rates of internal or external progression, it starts to raise questions of whether a god who was once behind another deity can surpass that deity. And if gods can sort of catch up to each other and surpass each other, then it starts to raise the question of in certain models of LDS progression, could I someday surpass that of heavenly father? If he doesn't have to be the conduit of everything good that I receive, if I can go outside of him, if I can graduate and matured and become independent and improve myself using other sources of other benefactors, then it raises the question of whether someday heavenly father would say, I mean, this is interesting because latter day saints are like, they appeal to the father-son analogy and they say, don't you want your son to become just like you? And they use that as an appeal for deification and Mormon exaltation. Well, if you push that metaphor out on earth, I want my son to become better than I am.

I want my son to become a much better person than I ever was, much more successful, much more, you know, just in all ways, I want my son to become, I want him to surpass me and build on my foundation and become even better than I ever was. So if you play out that metaphor, you know, why wouldn't heavenly father want his sons and daughters to surpass what he is and someday race ahead at a different accelerated rate of progression? We mentioned the dilemma of gods who fall, gods who can exercise libertarian free will to sin and all that would come of that. Mormons speak of the power of the atonement when they deal with the issue of whether heavenly father was once a sinner, perhaps. A lot of latter day saints will just say, well, that's why we have the power of the atonement. And I think, well, whose atonement? Because if heavenly father was once a sinful mortal, it would not be Jesus who paid for his sins. It would have been, in Brigham's model at least, the savior of a prior generation of the gods, of a different, a spirit uncle, I think.

I forget how the relationships work there. It would have been some other savior executing another power of the atonement. So power of the atonement in that cosmos multiverse system ends up being this abstract idea of many saviors achieving power of atonement for their particular jurisdictions. Now, what really threw me off, I was talking about this a little bit with Hannah Syriac. She might be a good dialogue partner. She's super clear and overt about theology, which I appreciated about her. So I had two interviews with her on my YouTube channel. The first one, we had terrible audio.

And the second one, we kind of redid it with better audio. And what threw me off is that she spoke of an LDS position, not the LDS position, certainly not a common LDS position, but there is an LDS position that Jesus's atonement, because it has retroactive effects and has an expansive effect on other planets, other children, some Latter-day Saints. I assume this is like one or two, but she made it known to me that there's some Latter-day Saints that hold the position that Jesus's atonement would have had a retroactive effect even to Heavenly Father's, perhaps, past sinful indiscretions. So, I mean, that's kind of, that's even more fringe than the fringe of the fringe. So it makes you think about that.

The gospel that he would have believed in that saved him was that maybe someday he would become a God and have a child that would save him. Yeah. In that model. Yeah. Yeah.

It's bad either way. You either, either he has a different savior paying for his sins, or he has some future savior paying for his sins, or maybe his great-great-great-grandchild is someday going to pay for his sins. You know, you have Latter-day Saints who really don't want to make Jesus's atonement limited in its scope.

So they try to push out as fat, as long as they can, as wide as they can. This one, this one has forever just floored me. This, this one, I will never stop being sucker punched by.

Like this one just blows me away. I talked to Latter-day Saints about whether Heavenly Father was once perhaps a sinful mortal. And they'll say, well, if he was a sinner, we should treat him as though he never sinned because his God would have forgiven him. And when God, when God forgives a sin, he remembers it no more.

And so I kind of pushed this out and I'm like, what do you really mean by that? Like, because when we use that language, we use the language to mean that he's not holding it against us. It's not that we literally forget, or that he literally forgets that he saved us. It's not that we it's, you know, like mission, it's the Men in Black where you just, God gets the zap and he forgets that we ever sinned. It's that he forgives us and he's gracious and he doesn't condemn us. And he doesn't hold it against us.

He doesn't hold it, hold it over us. We look back at that time and we say, God was so good, amazing grace. That's how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. We remember being wretches. God remembers it too. And but we remember that he showed amazing grace to us. And in that sense, he remembered our sin no more.

He removed it from us. But no, some Latter-day Saints push this out and they argue that Heavenly Father, his sins are literally forgotten. So if there was a moment where he was a sinful mortal, it's been scrubbed from the memory of the gods.

It's been removed from the history books. The Heavenly Father's browser history has been cleared such that no gods and no descendants will ever know that he was ever a sinner. So we should treat him as though we should operate as though he never was a sinner. And it's almost like in that model, you have God's own children graciously treating him like he never was a sinner, which is interesting because it's like, God, even if you weren't a sinner, I'll treat you like you weren't. Even if you were a sinner, I'll treat you like you weren't, which is where you have your inferior creation now, or at least your spirit kids upward being gracious to their Heavenly Father. It's like, we're just going to, you know, we're going to operate as though you never were a sinner. But it's really, it's God's domain to not hold sin against us. It's our domain not to hold sin against our neighbors. It's not our domain to be gracious toward God.

God doesn't need grace. If God is in, if God is eternally progressing, especially in his internal attributes in the Brigham model, I think Eugene England also held this view. Then that means that God has infinite dormant potential, that his potential will never be fully and exhaustively actualized. There's something that could be better within him forever. And there will be potential in him that never, if a progression is truly eternal and with respect to internal attributes within God, I mean, there's different ways you could spin this. You could say, well, maybe he has the potential in him to be what he ever will be. So in that case, you have infinite dormant potential that's never tapped because it's never exhausted. Or you could say, well, maybe potential is being added to God by his superiors that he's in his progression. He's additively acquiring more potential. Okay. But then you've just got more issues with like the Brigham model of dispensing downward potential downstream trickle-down theory kind of.

Yeah. You'd have to say, I mean, it just makes God look more puny. Like he not only needs his potential actualized, he needs his potential.

He needs more potential. And that's something I could say about me. I'm a creature though. I'm okay talking about that about me.

I'm not okay. And I think Mormons are typically okay through the latent Christian conscience talking to that way about God. And it goes back to what you were saying earlier about the always moving on the escalator, that there's a hunger. There would have to be a hunger there, a recognition that, gosh, I'm just not what I want to be or could be the kind of recognition that we have. If God is experiencing that, then how can I be satisfied in God ultimately? Who he is now is not sufficient for my final contentment and satisfaction. If God is not infinite, he is not ultimately satisfied. That makes God to be very boring if he's not infinite in this fullest sense. If Mormons say, they quote 2 Peter and they say, Hey, Peter says we can be partakers of the divine nature through the promises of God. Now, it's ripped out of context because they conclude from this that we can become gods in the fullest sense. We can become equal with God, or we can be on the escalator with God. Well, the LDS approach, well, firstly, the Christian approach to this passage is that through the promises of God, we can escape the corruption of the world and the sin of the flesh, the sinful flesh. So in the context of 2 Peter, this isn't about becoming omnipotent. This is about becoming virtuous. What's interesting is this is about a partaking that happens in this life with which we have our calling and election made sure.

There's so many landmines in this passage for Mormonism because they don't teach we can have our calling and election made sure except for a select few in the LDS faith. They're assuming, what they're really doing is they're assuming that God himself is a partaker of someone else's divine nature. What they're not grokking, to use a program or term, I love that term, is that for Christians, God doesn't partake in another God's nature. God isn't who he is in virtue of participating in someone else's divinity. What makes God special is that he is life in himself. He has life in himself. He is life in himself. He doesn't have his attributes merely.

He is his attributes. He is the source of everything good, true, and beautiful. That's breathtaking.

That's beautiful. That is owing, that provokes worship. So in 2 Peter says, we become partakers in the divine nature. We're becoming partakers virtuously through knowledge and added virtue and added faith progressively and incrementally. We're partaking in the divine nature of someone who himself doesn't need to partake in anyone else's divine nature. So if you reason from the passage, I can become like God fully, well, you need to think clearly if that's like saying through partaking, I can become the kind of being that never had to partake in another. It's like saying, I can learn to become someone who never had to learn to become someone, or I can inherit the status of never having to have inherited anything, or I can achieve a power that never needed to be achieved.

They're not thinking clearly. When Christians think about partaking or participating in the divine nature, we're participating as creatures finitely in the infinite nature. And we are enjoying this as creatures. We're not becoming the kind of being that never had to be about becoming. We already talked about how in the LDS system, God isn't really truly our Father, especially in the B.H. Roberts and Joseph Smith models. We don't really owe our very being or our core eternal existence or fundamental personhood to God. We can't thank him for giving us our core identity or our personhood.

This has been mentioned earlier. Latter-day Saints through the picture of exaltation is the nuclear family perpetuating into heaven. Then you kind of have this picture of Thanksgiving.

You've got mom and dad and the kids. Yeah, I really want to perpetuate that. Well, I mean, if mom and dad have a mom and dad, and all the kids have their own kids, and everyone's got in-laws to visit, and everyone's got their own planets to rule, and everyone, by the way, has trillions of their own spirit babies, and everyone has perhaps got social obligations to visit, spirit uncles and spirit ancestors and I mean, just to be clear here, Mormonism has posited a planet, like a real finite planet, and human bodies that can fit in a box that physically can be entirely contained in one spatial location. They're talking about a finite planet and deities that can't all fit together. You're only in one place at one time, and you're practicing meaningful presence. You're not. Anyway, so I mean, it really just raises questions of the nuclear family not being a really good model for Mormon exaltation.

That's how they sell it, but it's not that when it plays out. You don't have to the true light which gives light to everyone. We have found life beyond Mormonism to be brighter than we were told it would be, and the light we have is not our own.

It comes to us from without, thus, outer brightness. Our purpose is to share our journeys of faith and what God has done in drawing us to his son. We have conversations about all aspects of that transition, the fears, challenges, joys, and everything in between.

We're glad you found us, and we hope you'll stick around. And then you have the issue of, we mentioned earlier, what's the decorum, the courtesy, the model of honor? Do you bend the knee when you enter the presence of the deity king of a distant cosmic multiverse land under the sovereign ownership of a different deity that's, say, a distant relative? Do you bend, does one god bend the knee to another god, or is it just some sort of like, okay, when you go visit, you're just, you know, you're all peers. All the gods are peers.

Nobody submits to anybody. Well, then you just, you start having to ask questions about, again, the dilemma, the classic dilemma of, well, am I going to just become God's peer? They want to use that analogy of fathers, mothers, and children. Well, my son someday will grow up, and I will be his father, but he will no longer be dependent on me. He will no longer live in my household. When he visits, he will honor me. He will honor me from afar, but he's going to grow independent of me. In fact, it would be a bad measure of fatherhood if I kept my son dependent on me. So if I use creaturely and human fatherhood as the model for divine fatherhood, then I'm going to raise spirit children who become independent of me, who no longer have to thank me for everything that they have, who no longer express worship.

By the way, I think using the analogy of human fathers and sons for worship between spirit sons and spirit fathers, when Mormons do that, what they're really leaking out is they don't really have a robust view of worship. I think it's a terrible analogy because my son doesn't worship me. I would be a terrible father if I acted like I was my son's God. I don't discipline my son as though I'm his final authority. I discipline my son and my daughters in appeal to a higher authority to myself, over myself.

I'm not the final authority. And sometimes I have to apologize to my kids for my own sins. And sometimes they behold my own weaknesses. So if Heavenly Father has heavenly children, this model really breaks down quick.

Is he acting like he's a God over us when really he's acting under Heavenly Grandfather's stead? And what kind of model are we dealing with here? We talked about how the Mormon gods are not ultimately satisfying because they're really not even satisfied with what they have. They have an additive glory.

They don't have an infinite internal glory that's reflected outward. Or in the Brighamite model, they're progressing in all of their attributes. In the Mormon view, God is measurable. He has a number. They said worlds without number, but it starts at zero and it increments up finitely.

So it ends up being hyperbole on their part. He has a measurable number of planets, children, dominion, and that God has been God for a certain amount of moments. God has a history, he has a resume, he has a timeline. I can't worship God for all of who he is and was in the Mormon system because there was a time in the past where God wasn't worthy of worship. So I ended up having to block out of my mind as a Mormon God's possible indiscretions and say, I'm gonna worship him for who he is now and maybe for who he always will be in the future, but I'm not going to worship him for who he always was. Now the angels have a very different notion of God in Revelation four. They say, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty who was and is and is to come.

David says in Psalm 90, verse two, is that David? From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. So God for the Christian and the angels and the Jews, he's not merely impressive or worthy of worship for who he is today. He's impressive and he's worthy of utter adoration for who he always was.

Couple more, I got five more here. Boasting, the God, if there's any meaningful effort to comport the God of Mormonism with the God of the Bible, you have to grapple with this reality that God brags about himself in scripture. He boasts, he is quite proud of himself.

And in scripture, this is never depicted as a bad thing. It's often a motivation for what he does. He's a jealous God. It's actually one of his attributes. He's jealous.

It's not a mood swing, it's an attribute. He's a jealous God. He does everything for his own glory.

And his children, when they hear of God creating sunsets and sunrises and accomplishing redemptive history and defeating kings and humbling the proud and exalting the humble. And when God does this to his own glory and his own reputation, God's people clap their hands like little kids and they say, do it again, do it again. God's people love it when God boasts in himself and he brags in himself and he glories in himself. There's no one greater by whom he can swear.

There's no one better than him he can brag about. Scripture says to humans in the New Testament, why do you boast as though what you have, you did not receive? Well, God has what he has in virtue of not receiving it. It's in himself, it's of himself. God does not have what he has drawing from another. If God has received what he has from another, he ought not boast or brag or glory in himself.

He becomes very arrogant and self-centered. So when Mormons hear, especially Protestants, this really isn't just a uniquely Calvinist thing. This is present in the Armenian and Mullanist traditions too, God boasting and bragging in himself.

Where was I going with that? When Christians say that, this doesn't make God evil because sinful pride is thinking too highly of yourself, but God can't think too highly of himself. Well, Mormons are here leaking out their very low view of God thinking, well, if God were to do things for his own glory or brag or boast in himself, he would be sinful. Well, then you must have the kind of deity that can think too highly of himself. If your God can think too highly of himself, he's not the greatest. He is not the one of whom no one greater, conceivably greater can be conceived, sorry. He's not the one, yeah, you get me. So Mormonism has a problem with God being God-centered and self-bragging and self-boasting because in the background, he has received virtually everything he has.

He has learned virtually everything that he knows. So of course the LDS deity would be a jerk to act as though he's self-existent, self-bragger. But for Christians, it would be unloving of God not to brag in himself. We want God to glory in what is most glorious. And we want him to redeem us unto the enjoyment of what is most enjoyable. Well, what's most enjoyable is God. So when God directs and orchestrates and designs all of redemptive history for us to be God-ward and God-oriented, he is turning our gaze to what would give us most happiness, namely himself.

And we're quite pleased with that. If the Mormon system is true here and their gods are helping become mens, who become, helping men become gods, who help men to become gods and so forth, there's one eternal round in the system of the generations of the gods. And if the hymn, if you could hide a Kolob is correct and we don't know when the generations of the gods began to be, then if there's an eternal law, this idea that just is there as a part of the furniture of the Mormon multiverse of how things run, there's really no ultimate purpose to it. I mean, if you really press that, there's no ultimate personal being that has an actual purpose for the whole system. Like who's the god of the whole system? And by refusing to have an ultimate ground of all being, a personal being that's overall, there's no ultimate purpose to everything. So Mormons, if they think this through, they should suffer existential dread and think even if I do become a god, and even if I do become someone who helps others become gods, what's the point? It's just another version of a cynical reading of Ecclesiastes.

Just kind of keeping the same status quo, I guess. There's no ultimate final satisfaction. Yep. There's no ultimate first beauty that I can have a relationship with in that model. Do three more here.

I already did. Well, you have gods that are exalted with their resurrected bodies who are having these sexual relations. And I know some Mormons are like, well, we don't know if it's sexual.

Well, it's sexual in the sense that there's male and female and some sort of union, some sort of bodily union is required between these physical beings with parts and passions. Even if you say it's not through copulation, even if it's just artificial divine insemination, I don't know. Mormons will say, maybe there's different system of procreation in heaven. Okay, whatever. That's not the point. But you have these resurrected exalted human gods, demigods, supermen, whatever, and they're begetting spirit babies.

Well, hold on a second. Like this violates the begetting principle that an A begets of something that is type A, right? That humans beget humans. And you've got exalted beings that with exalted resurrected bodies that are begetting what? Spirit, they're not even begetting intelligences. They're not even begetting gods.

They're just not even begetting, they're just begetting spirit bodies for existing intelligences. Something's not right there. Just something doesn't fit.

Two more. One is that sin, if co-eternal with all the gods, is this violation really ultimately of just this impersonal idea. It's like violating a speed limit that nobody put there. It's like nobody's ultimately, like it's this rule book. And it's like the manual of the gods. And you open up the manual of the gods and you ask, well, who made the manual? I don't know.

Nobody did. I know who passed it down to me. The conduit deities who taught the next, taught the next, taught the next, the manual. This is the manual. This is how the universe works. Well, what is sin? Well, it's violating the manual. It's transgressing the order of the cosmos. And it's harming other people's ability to be conformed to the order of the cosmos.

It's causing pain maybe. Yeah, sure. There are different Mormon models of it. But sin makes so much more sense in the Christian worldview because you have a personal God who he's not inventing morality. He's not subject to an external standard of morality.

No. He is the standard of morality. His character is the root and the ground of all expressions of morality. So any law that is given is sourced in the very moral being of God. And sin therefore is a parasitical perversion of good. It is ultimately an offense against, not some impersonal manual standard eternal law, it is an offense against a particular being. It's personal. Sin is very personal ultimately in Christianity because what makes sin bad ultimately is that it opposes God.

It is treason. It is opposition to the goodness of goodness himself. And so sin is more interesting in Christianity because sin is more shocking. Sin is more dramatic. Sin in hell makes so much more sense because you're violating the ultimate most high who is himself love and goodness. Sin and Mormonism- It's personal and relational rather than just impersonal and like a rule book like you said that you're violating.

It's ultimately personal. Whereas sin and Mormonism is ultimately a violation of an impersonal standards without, to throw in the irony here without body parts or passions, some platonic form or recurring emergent law. And that in this system, evil is necessary in this Mormon system which requires opposition in all things. And then you really start having to ask questions like, well, so God is dependent on a system with evil to be himself good? Does he need like formidable opposition? I mean, what kind of opposition are we talking about here? Do we need like inconsequential opposition?

Like he can flick his finger and it just all goes away? Or do we need the kind of opposition that can put up a fight? Because what you mean is that God needs substantial opposition. Well, God's omnipotent, he's omniscient and he's good. Are you trying to say that some sort of formidable evil needs to exist for God to maintain his goodness, for God's goodness to be meaningful? Whereas Christianity is like, ultimately God doesn't need, God's goodness and God's godness and God's being isn't definitionally dependent on evil. Rather, it's the other way around. Evil is a parasite on what pre-existed. God, goodness, he is himself goodness. Now evil makes so much more sense in Christianity because it's violating God's very own character, which is the ultimate standard of goodness. Thank you for listening to all that.

And that's the end of my list. That's great. That last one reminds me of, on my mission, there's a debate in my, so missionaries are divided by district. So like you have companionships or two missionaries or sometimes three. And then there are multiple companionships in the district.

And so my district was having some kind of meeting or something or working altogether. And we were having a debate if God could lose, if his plan could fail, because if we are truly free, if we truly have free will, then God's plan could fail. All of his children could refuse to accept the atonement or the savior could fail in his task as savior and somehow lose all his creation. Or that's just not possible from the Christian perspective. Can I end with one thing? Or at least on my own monologue here?

Sure. Idolatry is ugly. And God hands over someone who has an idolatrous heart to believing foolish things with foolish implications, which are in violation of the authority of scripture, the clarity of scripture, God's own word. Well, I am some might say, are you mocking us? Are you mocking Mormonism?

In a sense, I totally am. In the sense of Elijah saying, your God is so weak here. But I want you to know that as I've tried to show throughout this, the only reason it's mockable is because there's a standard of the supreme God who ultimately will not be mocked. And this God is the one who can finally satisfy the eternity that's been put in man's heart. And our sin is so ugly that God hands us over to a kind of devolving spiraling downward foolishness, sexual foolishness, just the way we treat each other, the way we treat our own bodies and the way we interact and relate to God.

And I think this is so bad. Forget me, God thinks this is so bad that the lake of fire is reserved for those alongside the liars and the murderers and the thieves with the idolaters. And idolatry is very serious. If you have the kind of deity that's subject to these kinds of dilemmas, then you have an idol that can't save you. And it's the kind of idol that God himself would mock in the book of Isaiah.

He mocks or Elijah would mock with Baal. But I hope this would provoke you to, hey, there is this God that will not be mocked because he is supreme. And your sin is not your sin of idolatry, of having this Mormon deity system. That is not beyond the forgiveness of God's grace. It is not beyond the blood of Jesus. And my goodness, it is not beyond the forgiveness of God's people. If you would repent of this and become a childlike humble worshiper of the great supreme God of the Bible, worshiping at the feet of Jesus at the cross who accomplished forgiveness of sins and the complete sacrifice by his blood, finished at the cross, busted out of the tomb three days later, all authority under heaven and earth. His word is completely sufficient.

His word is completely authoritative. God commands you to do certain things and within his command is embedded the authority to do those things, repent and believe in the gospel. You will be saved. Confess your idolatry and you will be forgiven.

And God's people will no longer remember your sins in the sense that most matters here. We will take you in to a local church and we will treat you like you're just one of us. You don't even have to be ex-Mormon in the sense of your identity, right? You need to be an ex-Mormon. You need to reject that awful ugly system and become a biblical Christian. But your identity with other Christians doesn't need to be ex-Mormon. It's just brother and sister in Christ who is equal in the faith, totally forgiven, loved by Jesus, not defined by your past identity or your past mistakes or your past ugly idolatry. You can put that behind you and have a very freeing relationship of worship toward God as the supreme and most high God.

And you could, you know, I'll end with this. If you could high to Kolob, the Mormon song says, we don't know when the generations of the gods began to be. Well, the message of Christianity is the very first God. Isaiah 44, verses six and eight.

I am the first and I'm the last. Besides me, there is no God. The very first God showed his love in this way.

He sent Jesus for God, for the very first God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life, eternal life. So please repent and join us in worshiping the rock of ages, cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee. Let the water and the blood which from thy wounds, from, I forget, from thy wounds. Anyway, be of sin the double cure, save from wrath and make me pure. Save from wrath and make me, be of sin the double cure, save from wrath and make me pure. The rock of ages who assumed humanity and was cleft, who was crucified for you on the cross. And that's why Christians are so just like, what about Christmas?

Rock of ages, baby, died on a cross. You trust in that savior, you get the double cure for the penalty for your sin and the power of sin being removed from you and forever having fellowship with God and his people. And amen, thanks for that, Aaron. Beautiful, amen.

Just wanna thank you for coming on the Outer Brightness Program. And I wanna say to our Latter-day Saint listeners, one of the things that I've always appreciated about Aaron as I've watched his videos over the years and watched him dialogue with Latter-day Saints. And it's one of the reasons I'm glad to have had this opportunity to have the conversation with him in person virtually is that, you know, Latter-day Saints will often kind of get concerned or get hurt that, you know, when we try it, when we try to talk about, when we Christians try to talk about their theology, Aaron touched on it earlier, you know, there's the whole, you know, what you're saying is not official kind of rejoinder that we get, but one of the things that I've always appreciated about Aaron as I've watched, about you, Aaron, as I've watched your videos is that you really do try to understand LDS theology and all the various versions of it in order to speak with clarity to Latter-day Saints and speak with understanding and with charity.

I appreciate that about you. I know that as you've had debates with Latter-day Saints, you know, that there are times when Latter-day Saints kind of reach out in anger. And I would encourage our Latter-day Saint listeners not to do that. That comes from the desire to defend that Mormon identity.

And our identity ultimately should be in Christ. And so just wanted to tell you, Aaron, that I appreciate that about you. It's something that I've watched and paid close attention to in your videos. So thank you for that. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you very much. We appreciate you coming on our program. Is there anything else you'd like to promote or share, social media, you want them to follow your Snapchat or your Instagrams and Twitters?

MRM.org. You can kind of Google me and find a bunch of Instagram, Twitter, YouTube stuff. But if you're on Facebook, you can add me. I sometimes figure out maybe who added me and try to figure out who somebody is just so I know what they're going for. But if you email me, I'll try to get back to you, aaronshefatgmail.com or just Facebook messenger me or Instagram messenger me. And I'll more likely respond. Email just becomes a pit sometimes. But I really enjoy having one-on-one dialogues with Latter-day Saints. So there's a lot of Zoom or Google Meet video chats I'll do with Latter-day Saints.

One-on-one, not publicized, not broadcasted, not recorded. You know, you're not a lab rat. You're not, you know, just, you know, you're not a project. I'd be happy to have, you know, a private discussion with you if you've got complaints or questions or they're just thoughts. I'd love, I've tried to be generous with my time. That's great. Yeah, thank you, Aaron. I really appreciate you again. I want to thank you again for coming on the program. And yeah, we also have a Facebook group. So for our podcasts, so if anybody has questions, they can request you in our group.

And then they can leave questions or comments about this program or, you know, have a discussion on it and then we can pass it along if they choose to go that route. So thank you again, Aaron, for coming on the program. And we praise God for, you know, using you as an instrument and helping others come to Christ. And we pray that your ministry and your seminary studies will go well. Thanks, man. No problem. Thank you for spending your time this evening to talk about this, the dilemmas. And so, you know, maybe if you come up with another list someday, we'll do another one.

So we'll see. Thanks, Aaron. God bless.

God bless. We thank you for tuning into this episode of the Outer Brightness podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Please visit the Outer Brightness podcast page on Facebook. Feel free to send us a message there with comments or questions by clicking send a message at the top of the page.

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You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit that notification bell. Music for Outer Brightness is graciously provided by the talented Brianna Flournoy and Adams Road. You can learn more about Adams Road by visiting their ministry page at adamsroadministry.com. ["In the past I believed in my own righteousness and hope that I was worthy of the blood that Jesus shed. But now I know that all the works I did were meaningless compared with Jesus' lonely death on the cross where He bore sin.

And now I have the righteousness that is by faith in Jesus' name." I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus. For who's sake, I have lost all things because of the cross. On the cross, Jesus took away the written code, the law of words that stood opposed and nailed it there for me.

And through the cross, He put to death hostility. And in His body reconciled us to God and brought us peace. And I am crucified with Christ.

I no longer live, but He lives in me. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus. For who's sake, I have lost all things But when I gained Jesus, it was worth the cost. All my righteousness I count as a loss because of the cross. Some demand a sign and some seek to be wise, but we preach Christ crucified. A stumbling bottle of sun, the foolishness of God, but wiser than the wisest man, the power of the cross. May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord through which the world has been crucified to me. And I tell the world, so I take up my cross and follow where Jesus leads. Oh, I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus. For who's sake, I have lost all things. But when I gained Jesus, it was worth the cost. All my righteousness I count as a loss because of the cross. Because of the cross.