Challenging Days Still Ahead, Hayden Carroll Misuses Quotes

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. Oh, I wanted to keep our shoes out of the socks today. More comfy shoes. I'm going to be standing for hours today. And so I wore some nice comfy shoes.

So for the class, we'll have to zoom in a little bit more. Anyways, yes, going to be teaching early church history starting tonight for Grace Bible Theological Seminary. And always enjoy doing that. My two favorites are our early church and medieval reformation.

I haven't got a chance to do the medieval reformation class yet. Hopefully soon. Somebody else stole that from me when I first started teaching there, but we won't talk about that. Anyway. Yes. Rich wants me to to advertise.

I absolutely detest that picture and it looks even worse on the camera. But that's me at 10 years from now. AI. Yeah. OK. AI and 60 pounds can do a lot for you. But yes, coming up October 17th at the very least.

Icon Veneration and the Upcoming Debate

Mark it down for those who have great interest in this particular topic. Icon veneration as defined by the Second Nicene Council in 787 is apostolic. The thesis being defended by Craig Trulia. I'm in the denial and will be live streamed at 9 a .m. on a Saturday.

Yes, that's the will definitely be the earliest debate I've ever done. That may not be a good thing. I don't know. We'll see how we feel that early in the morning, especially since it's a probably a good hour drive out there from my place.

So I'm going to be getting going real. So I drove that yesterday. Oh,.

You know, it is an hour and one minute from my house, from your house. OK. But that was.

Also mid afternoon. Yeah. OK. It's not too bad. There's there's that. So it's over in the East Valley. And of course, you're welcome to come if you're in the area. But I don't expect a huge crowd, honestly, on a Saturday morning.

So many people have kids playing soccer, baseball or whatever, that it's really difficult on a on a Saturday. But that was what we had to do to to get the proper opponent to be able to do this right. So that's coming up real fast at me.

And I'm excited about that. The real challenge is going to be remembering all the information that I'm going to need to remember and have at my fingertips for that particular that particular encounter.

So real quick on the logistics there, the.

Can anybody hear you? Yes. Oh, I can. Of course they can. Yes. Oh, but you're on. This is mixed minus. So you're you're not allowed to hear that part. So the we're allowed to be in the in the building at eight at eight a .m.

And theoretically, we would open the doors at eight thirty. Debate starts at nine sharp. That's the plan. Have a couple of breaks during that three hour period of time ends at noon and we're out. The building goes to the next group coming in at one o 'clock.

So we do have somewhat of a tight window there. But I am looking for clarification from the church to make sure that I have my times right.

Yeah. And I need to look back at the emails with Craig on exactly what the format for the debate is as far as the time frames are concerned. We want to make sure there was sufficient time given the topic, but I don't think it was set up for three hours.

That's probably a little bit longer, but that may include audience questions and stuff like that. But yeah, I'm not. Again, I'm not real big on audience questions. Well, I promised.

To buy three by five cards for the moderator, so we'll do that and pass out pencils and.

All that fun stuff. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. All right. So that's that's coming up there. Now, today on the program, I have the distinct feeling that there was something I said I was going to talk about last time.

That I've already forgotten about. Man, what was that? It just something just struck me that there was something that I had had queued up. And I didn't. Let me see here. No, we played the Jimmy Akin thing.

Secularism, Political Crisis, and Christian Faithfulness

Yeah, I don't see anything. Yeah. Anyway, I'm not going to. Let me just make one quick comment and then we're going to go to this clip that I have from Hayden Carroll. You may have noticed that I really haven't been saying almost anything about the NXR debacle since we made our position very clearly known regarding having people like Alex Jones and these other people who Stein and these other people who are not only clearly not Christians, but they are openly either just, you know, the stuff that's been posted from Stein is pornographic, basically.

And Alex Jones, you know, talks to aliens. He's so far out there. The very idea these people have something that they can, that we can, you know, use to redeem the nation tells you what NXR is all about.

I mean, they have so lost the plot and completely lost connection to anything that's real that it's sad. You know, it really, really is. There was a time only a few years ago when we thought we were pretty much going down the same road, but they hung the hard left.

It wasn't us. They're the ones that decided to move. And so, oh, what? Oh, you didn't get the sound, huh? Got to get sound. Okay. So, but with the recent stuff, you know, about socialism and things like that, it just strikes me that the crash out that is taking place is happening with such rapidity and violence that there just isn't really much to say other than to just stand back, stay out of the splatter zone and just watch as everything, you know, explodes.

The nastiness you're seeing online and stuff, I just, I'm just, it's just to the point where it's like, hey, if you can't see where this is going and I realize there are people who can't, and I realize they're young men, they're really disappointed in us, you know, because they're so frustrated by what they're seeing around them.

I get it. I'm frustrated too. In fact, I had a young fellow come up to me recently, and I won't give the context or anything, but, you know, basically he was like, you know, when do we start doing things?

I'm like, what? Who are you going to shoot first? You know, I see. It really seems to me, and boy did I get some, I mean, I just, I've made this comment as half a sentence on something I posted recently.

I said it just seems like Trump's doing everything he can to make the midterms a disaster, and I just said it in passing, and I didn't give any details. I didn't talk about just how foolish the war in Iran has been, and, you know, what's happening economically as a result, and how do you turn the independents off, and, you know, all that kind of stuff, and it just seems to me that he has been extremely foolish and unwise in many of the things he's done.

Has he done good things? Yes. Do I regret my vote? Are you kidding? Kamala Harris? I'm sorry. Worst presidential candidate ever put forward in any country, and I include Venezuela. Just, you, no rational person can vote for that woman.

I'm sorry. That is, I mean, word salad was the nicest thing anyone said about Kamala Harris. She would have been just as much of an empty suit as Joe Biden. Somebody else would have been running the country.

Again, I don't think we have any military secrets at all. I really don't. I think the Chinese know everything. That's how compromised we are, and we have professed communists running for the Senate and the House, that this nation has signed its own death warrant, in my opinion, and it's not for the reason, it's not because of the Jews.

It's for what I've been talking about for 30 years. It's called secularism. It is called the abandonment of the fundamental worldview that made sense to epistemology, to the legal system, to our view of the world, and it's not only been abandoned, it's been rejected and rejected with animus, and as a result, the system that needs that foundation cannot survive.

The Constitution of the United States cannot survive. Communists, I don't know how a communist, a communist cannot raise their hand, put their hand on the Communist Manifesto or the Koran or whatever they're going to put their hand on, because swearing means nothing outside the Christian worldview anyways.

In a secular worldview, swearing means nothing. I mean, think about what swearing is. I swear by a higher authority. There is no higher authority than you. If you as a guy can decide you're a gal, then you're the highest authority there is, so swearing is irrelevant, but I don't know how any of them can swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.

They hate the Constitution of the United States. The only reason they're there is to destroy it, and one of the two political parties, their fundamental reason for existence is the destruction of the Constitution of the United States, so I think every one of them is an illegitimate office holder personally, and they're traitors.

They're guilty of treason. Someone define for me, I wasn't going to do this, someone define for me a better definition of treason than opening the borders of a nation to an invading army for years on end, and then once that army has invaded, do everything you can to make sure you cannot expel them from your borders again, and then make sure that you bleed the citizens dry by stealing from them to give their money to the invading army.

That's exactly what has happened in the United States, exactly, and it's not because of the Jews, or aliens, or a post-war consensus, or classical liberalism. I mean, it's just so sad to see these people just crashing out, going after every stupid thing out there, when they used to know what the issue was, and evidently they didn't really know back when they said that they did.

So, I mean, that's when half the people in your government are traitors, your government's not going to last very long. It's not going to function well, and so that's what's going on as far as I'm concerned, and is that frustrating?

Well, of course it's frustrating, of course it's frustrating, but what do you do about it? It seems like, especially for young men, the idea is we just we need to go to war, and it's like, and what's the end game?

What are you going to put back together after you get done with your war? Where are you going? How do you get supplies? They're not thinking through any of that kind of stuff. It's just, I'm frustrated, and I said to this young man, frustration is not a Christian virtue.

The Early Church in a Declining Roman Empire

It's one thing to recognize the fact that a once-great nation is intent upon its immolation. I get that, and so I understand that frustration, but what did the early church do when the church was birthed into the collapsing Roman state?

You see, nobody knows anything about history anymore. We don't study it in school. School's not school. School's indoctrination center, so that purple-haired chick up there, if it's even a chick, can't tell anymore.

Isn't going to be telling you about real history anyway, but if we knew something about history, we'd know that in those first centuries of the Christian church, Rome was in decline. She had hit her ultimate high right around the same time as the church begins, and then there is clear, obvious decline over the next number of centuries, and that led to all sorts of conflict, persecution, the whole thing about Caesar is lord, and the early church had to deal with all that stuff, but no one's looking back there to go, well, how did they do it, and how can we map that onto where we are today?

What are the differences? How does technology affect how we are going to deal with an ever-secularizing nation? How do we call a nation to repentance at the feet of Christ? One of the differences that maps into this is this nation once professed to recognize the authority of Scripture and the authority of Jesus Christ, and yeah, people try to hide all that and ignore the Supreme Court decisions and the central role of the Bible and all that kind of stuff.

They're rewriting history. Rewriting history is a big thing these days, and if you don't have paper books, people can rewrite your history without you ever knowing it. I mean, I love AI. AI can be extremely helpful.

AI can do all sorts of things, but AI can also... You've read 1984? Do you know what the chief character in that novel was doing? He was editing history. Now, he was having to do it without the tech, but with AI, like we have it today, you know how easy it would be to completely wipe out actual history, replace it with a complete fake, including video, audio, everything?

It strikes me that a number of these dystopian movies... What was that one? It had the actor Michael Jordan, I think. Am I remembering that correctly? IRobot? No, no, no, not iRobot. It was the one where he was a fireman, I think is what it was, and they would find...

Somebody in the channel will tell you. They would find books. People were still hiding books. You weren't allowed to have books anymore, and they would find books, and this isn't Equilibrium either, though that one was freaky good, very freaky good, and along the same exact same lines, Proseum and all that kind of stuff.

That was a cult classic, and it was really well done. This was a more modern one, because you had sort of like a Facebook thing, and they were projecting stuff. They'd be getting likes when they'd burn books, and thumbs up and thumbs down, stuff like that, but it was all about changing history and using tech to do it, and the one thing that stood in the way of changing history is books that you can't change without destroying them, and that's exactly...

These dystopian movies have sort of been warning about this for a long, long time, and it would only take, honestly, two major elections in this nation. Think about it. I wasn't going to do all this. I've gone 20 minutes, and here I am rambling along.

I'm sorry.

So we've got a couple of suggestions here. Fahrenheit 451? Nope, that's old. Book of Eli?

What? Book of Eli? Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. This was only a few years ago. Young black actor. Michael B. Jordan. I think so, and they were called firemen, and they'd be called out to destroy books when they were found, and he gets converted, and they were using a bird.

They used a bird's DNA to store all of human history in digital form to keep it alive, to get it up to Norway or something like that.

I think everyone is stuck in the same place you are. They know the actor, they can picture it, but they can't remember the name of the movie.

Yeah. I'm not even sure where I saw it. I don't think I have it in my library, either. So, yeah. You know what? I think... You know what it might have been? Did they do a remake of Fahrenheit 451? I believe so, yeah.

That may have been it. It may have been the remake. It was only...

Yeah, that's coming up a number of times here. Everybody's going, it's a remake of Fahrenheit 451. Okay, all right. That's what it was. Which makes sense, because that's what that was about, burning books.

The firemen. This was only three or four years ago.

Yeah, the fire department burned books. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's Fahrenheit 451, but it was the remake. It wasn't the original, because they threw in all the tech. That's the thing. All those 70s dystopian stuff just had no idea of what AI could do, and stuff like that.

Anyways, how in the world did we get onto all that? But all these dystopian movies seem to have been, you know, putting their finger on what the real challenges are going to be, and it's not... The Jews!

Just so... The drivel. The level of drooling these guys must do these days. Sorry. Anyway, all right. So, there you got, you know, what I was going to say is, two major elections. If the communists, and just call them what they are now, okay?

Just call them what they are. If the communists take over the House and the Senate, or just the House. If the communists take the House in a matter of months, well, it would be, what, start in January.

Donald Trump will set the all-time record, and it's not going to last very long, because there's not going to be a presidency for long anyways, at least a real one. The all-time record is the number of impeachments.

He's already got four, I think. In fact, I think they tried to impeach him after he was out of office before. They were so insane. But, you know, they might go for 47, just simply, you know, for the number type thing.

He will never get to do anything again. He will be impeached for spitting on the sidewalk. The communists will use everything in their power. They don't care about the continuing functioning of the government.

They want the government to fall. That's what they're about. They're traitors. So, that's what they do. He will be impeached over and over, and they're already talking about it. They're already talking about it.

You know, you may not notice it, but they're talking about it. If they get the House and the Senate, then they'll get him out, and then they'll go after Vance. These people will not allow someone not from the communist party to be in charge in the United States in the future.

That's it. There is no bipartisanship. There is no desire for the nation to continue. That's it. And then, of course, they will stack the Supreme Court. That's how you get rid of that annoying thing called the Constitution.

And those annoying justices who go, you know, these words had meaning back then, and they still have meaning now, and we already have one Supreme Court justice who has the IQ of a wet shoelace, who is such an ideologue that she doesn't believe any of that stuff, and now you put 10 more on like her, and you think the Constitution is relevant at that point?

Nope. It can be completely irrelevant at that point. So two major elections in the course of two years, and you don't have a First Amendment, you don't have a Second Amendment, we don't have any protections for doing this.

You know, we were thinking back in 2021 -2022, you know, forced inoculation, all the rest of that kind of stuff. Censorship all over the place. You think they're going to allow X to stay free? No. We already know what they did before, and they got away with it, and so they're going to do it again.

And so we're going to be looking for the dark web, and we're going to be looking for how to get your stuff out, you know, to the people who know, I mean, and that could happen so fast that it'll turn your hair gray, which won't bother me much, but you understand the analogy.

So yeah, what do you do then? How do you remain faithful in that context? What happens when they come and put padlocks on the front door of your building? Are you ready to go to secret meetings like the Christians did back then?

And is it frustrating that this was once a Christian nation that honored Christ and his word and has now rebelled against that? You bet. No two ways about it. Is that one way that we're different from the early church?

Is that the early church is birthed into a pagan empire? And then there's sort of a conversion, but wow, there's so much to think about when we think about what really happened with Constantine, what really happened with all of that.

Yeah, church history is important and might have real relevance to us in the not too distant future. We got a little breathing room, but it's passed quickly. And I don't know that we did much with it.

Partly because certain people made sure that the people who had an important message got distracted with the Jews, post-war consensus, Nephilim, socialism, you know, it's just like, wow, okay, there you go.

All right, so first half hour of the program, totally unscripted, but we continue on. And by the way, I'm going to have to say this, I'm sorry, Rich, I shouldn't do this. But evidently we have chat on YouTube and I think for a while.

We turned that off, didn't we? Turned it off for a while, but brought it back and it's worked.

Out really well. Yeah, well, we don't do comments on YouTube, that's for sure. No, we can't do.

Comments. And just, you bring that up, we have Muslims, we have atheists, we have all kinds of people who will drop four-letter words all over the place just because they can't, and then we.

Turn comments off for that reason. Yeah, well, we had some guy, now I'm getting the second hand, okay, but we had some guy, and why are the lights all wrong on the cameras again? This one's green, that one's red, but that's the one I'm on, not that one, so I don't, it's confusing.

I guess I'm on the little camera, not the big camera, that's why, yeah, see, but those lights don't change, they just stay white, so that doesn't tell me nothing. So anyway, it's just confusing. So some guy came in during the last program, and I'm getting a second hand, and informed everyone in the chat that our new studios, which are not new studios, this is the same studio that Rich initially put together a year and a half ago?

A couple.

Years ago. Yeah, two. I built the walls in my garage during the wintertime, I'm thinking 2023.

Yeah, somewhere around there. It's the exact same room, we move stuff around, but the walls have stayed the same, we put, Rich puts different lights up, and every time I leave,.

He gets this... I think I'm done, actually. Oh, you think you're done? Yeah, okay. Famous last.

Word, right? Yeah, until he sees the next gadget online. Oh, that would be great. Anyway, and so this guy comes in, says that our new studio was bought and paid for by my wife. By my wife. And I'm just like, what?

My wife? Well, you know, if she had money, I'm sure she'd be willing to do something like that. But my wife worked for the airlines for 23 and a half years, so we'd have health insurance. And she got fired right at the beginning of COVID, had to retire.

And she primarily takes care of her parents now. In fact, she's going to be leaving this weekend to go to California, help with her dad who's having surgery. And most of the time, you know, today she's at her mom's.

She's taking her mom to a number of different doctor's appointments and to surgeries, and they're having some piece of furniture delivered today, and she's going to have to help get it in the house. And so that's what keeps her busy.

And as far as income is concerned, you know, we're in our early to mid -60s, and she teaches minimally four, sometimes seven, aerobics classes per week. I mean, she's in great shape, but they don't pay a lot to teach an aerobics class.

So it just makes you wonder, where do these people come from? You know, I suppose there's somebody that they're confusing that with somebody's wife that has, you know, wealth or something like that, but my dear wife doesn't.

And so it was just like, why do people get excited about things like that? And think that they need to come in to a chat channel on a webcast and just demonstrate how utterly moronic they are. I don't know.

I don't know. But it's, what? He was swiftly removed. He was swiftly removed. And permanently. And permanently.

And, you know, I tried to correct his understanding, and it wasn't to be corrected, because he had, what do they call it? He had the T. Oh, he had the T. He had the T. He heard it somewhere in some little private group, and he had the T, and it's like, oh boy.

Yeah. Anyway, so yeah,.

Wild and strange and crazy stuff. Okay. Hayden Carroll is a Mormon apologist here in the Phoenix area. I have encountered him a few times out at the LDS Easter pageant. And, you know, oh, that's what I was going to do.

Mormonism, Salvation, and the Doctrine of Man

That's what I was going to do. There was a, see if I can find it here. Yes. Where did it go? Is it above this? Oh, no, no. I have to go into history to be able to find my drafts. There they are, bookmarks.

Here is one of his, this was 16 hours ago. We're going to look at this one in just a second, but I wanted to do this one first. Last week, he had posted, you know, this logical syllogism, okay, where you have a premise one, premise two, premise three, conclusion, et cetera, et cetera.

So he likes doing that. And it was where he did the Jesus became man, therefore Jesus is the God-man, as if this is relevant to Mormonism, because obviously the only premise you have to start with is Jesus is the God-man.

Biblically is absolute monotheism. Before me, there was no God for him, there should be none after me. God has eternally been God. All the things that utterly refute Joseph Smith's wild imagination at the end of his life.

And so I jokingly corrected some of the things and then had as my conclusion, and polytheism is still absurd. And they're like, you don't know what a syllogism is. I'm like, you don't know what a joke is.

It's just that you don't get it. So here's another one that he posts. Premise one, trusting in Christ is something I do that is necessary for my salvation. Premise two, if anything I do that is necessary for my salvation gives me grounds to boast, then trusting in Christ gives me grounds to boast.

Premise three, trusting in Christ gives me no grounds to boast. Conclusion, therefore, is false that anything I do that is necessary for my salvation gives me ground to boast. Now, a couple of things.

The Mormons don't get to be a part of this debate. They don't for many reasons. The primary reason they don't is they do not have a God to be the foundation and ground of all this because their deity figure was once a man who lived on another planet.

Now, some of them will argue, he might have been the savior figure of that planet, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if they believe they can be exalted, then they believe that a sinful man can go through the process of salvation, do the various ordinances and works that are necessary to become exalted and to become a God just as Elohim did before he settled on a planet that circles a star named Kolob, evidently.

But anyway, so they don't get to sit at this table because their God can't answer the big questions. And yet they want to. They really, really want to be a part of all this stuff. They want to pretend, hey, we're Christians like everybody else.

We get to do all the debates and things like that, despite the fact that we believe that we are the only true church on earth and that without the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood authorities, you all are just wasting your time anyway.

They don't necessarily talk about that all that much, but that's what the teaching is. At least it was. That could be changing too, who knows. But anyway, he's commenting here on the provisionist stuff.

He's responding to a guy named Danny who said, if anything that you do contributes to your salvation, that's giving you a reason to boast. The Bible says salvation only comes by trusting alone in Jesus.

So what's he trying to say? He's trying to talk about the empty hand of faith. And maybe he was addressing the provisionist idea that everybody gets prevenient grace, and so the provisionist doesn't have a meaningful answer to the real question, which is why you and not somebody else.

If you get the same thing that your next door neighbor gets, if he gets the same grace that you get, because if you get a better grace, that's election. That's favoring one person over another, and we know they're not going to do that.

And so it's all got to be peanut butter grace. It's just slathered all over everybody and everybody gets the same amount. And there's no effective prevenient grace. It's just all prevenient. So anyway, maybe that's what was being addressed there, is that if I get the same grace as everybody else, and yet I choose to do the right and somebody else chooses to do the wrong, then where really does the difference lie?

Well, it means I'm better, I'm more spiritual, I'm more understanding, I'm more pliable, whatever it might be. And this is something we brought up with the confession of the Scythias, too. Same thing.

Maybe that's what it was about, I don't know. But I'm looking at this and I'm like, okay, the problem is Mormonism has no biblical anthropology. It can't have a biblical anthropology. What's a biblical anthropology?

A doctrine of man derived from Scripture. Well, they deny the sufficiency of Scripture to build an anthropology. The anthropology of the Book of Mormon is just decrepit 1829-ish misunderstandings of having heard Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterian preaching and not really understanding the differences between them.

And then, of course, that all just gets warped into a truly mutant situation once Smith becomes a polytheist and starts trying to change everything from how he started stuff. So you don't have a biblical anthropology.

I mean, Adam fell that men might be and men aren't, they might have joy. Adam fell upward. Adam's fall is what makes mankind possible. They can't even get through the door because they don't have a biblical anthropology to begin with.

So the idea that is being responded to is outside the realm of what Mormonism can address because they don't believe in the deadness of man and sin. They don't have a God that can predestine anything.

They don't have a God that can, in mercy and grace, choose and elect people outside of their own merits and things like that. So you can put all the logical syllogisms together you want. Premise one for Mormonism will always be false.

Premise one for Mormonism is, we have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea and take away the veils that you may see. That's Joseph Smith. That's Mormonism.

And that premise is false. So anything after that, the conclusions will also be false. That's just how it works. So yeah, that was one of them. But then there's this one. And so this is a clip. He puts these, he does these dialogues, I guess, with Christians or something.

The Biblical Foundations of the Trinity

I saw somewhere he said that he, this is day three or week three or month three, I don't know what it was, of me inviting anybody to come on my program and explained me where the Bible teaches the Trinity.

And you know, I'm just sort of like, yeah, wrote a book on that. Yeah, I don't think you're up to refuting it. And yeah, I know where that would go. But again, we've sort of been playing games. I've written to him, suggested topics.

Jeff wrote to him. Jeff wanted to do an in-studio thing. No, I want formal, moderated debate. Well, all right. But on what? Because he's a hyper-skeptic. He, like I said last time, he does the, it's our little hawk thing, where he uses skepticism about canon stuff.

And that's his thing. I think that's what he did with this guy he's talking to here too, is he pulls stuff out that most apologists have never even thought of before, not even dealt with, especially if they deal primarily with Mormonism.

Because it's interesting, modern Mormon apologists have to argue very, very differently than the Mormons who started the church and had living apostles out there doing the debates with them. You know, apostles and stuff like that.

They went out and did debates. You know, they were out challenging people. The apostles don't do that no more. They done changed their job description. Yeah. And so isn't it funny that modern LDS apologists argue so differently than the early Mormons did?

But they do. Big time. And so here is, I just want to play a portion of this and point something out before we get back to Decithius, if we ever get there at the rate that.

I'm going. So what I'm asking you to do is to establish the Trinitarian formulation of God from the text itself, because that is your standard. Yes. You didn't justify, but I'll grant it.

Okay, so I want you to establish Trinity from the Bible. Okay, wrote a book on it. How do you do that? You don't do that by saying the word Trinity is in the Bible, because it's not. You do that by establishing the three foundational doctrines of the doctrine of Trinity.

The fact there is only one true God, and some discussions of this, we'll sort of skip that part because they're not used to dealing with Mormons. The vast majority of people they deal with are monotheists, or at least default to the idea of a God rather than many gods.

So, you know, a lot of historical writing, theological writing on the Trinity assumes monotheism because the people that you're dealing with would not be polytheistic pagans, basically. So that's part of the reason for that.

But three foundational doctrines. The Bible teaches that Yahweh Elohim, Lord God, the covenant God of Israel, is the creator of all things. Nothing exists that he did not bring into existence. He is the only true God.

All other gods will perish from the earth. All other gods are the imaginations of men's minds. There are spiritual beings that he has created that are beneath him and under his control, but he is not dependent upon them or controlled by them.

There is only one true God who has eternally been God. That's premise number one. That is the plain and obvious teaching of Scripture. Mormonism has to fundamentally twist Scripture and engage in a hermeneutic of skepticism and unbelief that they never engage in for the Book of Mormon.

Mormon apologists have to, and it's so easy to see this, Mormon apologists use a completely different standard in looking at the Bible than they use in the Book of Mormon. You have to give the Book of Mormon every kind of benefit of the doubt, because in comparison to the Bible, historicity, textual, everything, the Book of Mormon is decrepit because it's a work of 19th century fiction by a really bad writer.

There's a reason why Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon chloroform in print. They have to use completely different standards for the Book of Mormon than they do with the Bible. This guy is king of that, big time.

Anyway, what they'll do is they will go after all these...you saw what Kwaku did years ago when we did the debate on Apology Radio. That's the standard thing that's taught up at BYU. There were all sorts of deities back then that claimed to be the only two deity, and of course this is just parallel to that.