Historian explains

Stacker claims he "deconstructed Mormonism" and therefore knows it all. 

The Last Californian  

@CalifornianLast

That is the vanity of the angry Exmos and hidden, cancerous, apostates like Stacker. They assume none of us have made the same intellectual examinations they have, they assume that we don’t understand the world, or facts, or science, or anything else God created to give us to reason our way to conclusions. I too left the church, examine the world from the outside, even joined another faith, and Stocker would never acknowledge that I could have gained wisdom like yourself, because I don’t believe as he believes. And really, they desperately cling to their conclusions for that hubris, for the praise of the world, or for gay, or for sex, or for substances, or any combination of those things. Otherwise the light of Christ would shine through.

Stacker

@stackerco

·

May 17

Replying to @jonathanplumb

A reason you’re still a TBM is because you have no idea what you’re talking about. Otherwise you’d be out.

 

Jonathan Plumb

@jonathanplumb

Stacker forgets that I already left the Lord’s Church. I already walked that road. I already discovered that no man does it as well as the Lord. No man. Without exception. That is why I came back. Not because every problem in the historical record suddenly vanished. No. History itself is fractured. That much is certain. And I say this not as some armchair expert pretending to be intelligent online, but as an actual credentialed historian. Professional historians widely agree that the historical record is incomplete, biased, selective, politically shaped, and constantly revised. That is not controversial. Recorded history is not pure truth preserved untouched through time. It is fragments of truth filtered through imperfect men, institutions, agendas, memory, corruption, and power. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time. I wasn’t a historian yet. So why did I come back, when I once believed the Church was false and the historical record had “clearly” proven it? Because the Lord Himself condescended into my darkness and pulled me out of it. Whether that experience was fully literal, fully spiritual, or something in between, I cannot perfectly say. “Whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth” (2 Corinthians 12:2–3). All I know is this: When I awoke the next morning, lying on my back and staring upward into heaven, I knew I had been wrong. I could not yet explain why. I did not suddenly possess answers to every historical question. I simply knew — with terrifying clarity — that the Lord wanted me back. And what kind of fool ignores that? Stacker wants to call it a drug-induced delusion. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But whatever it was, my mind was clear, my heart knew what needed to be done, and I returned. And here is the part people never seem to understand: My witness did NOT come immediately. For many months I served the Lord with full commitment while still internally wrestling with whether it was all true. I lived the Gospel before I fully knew. Then eventually, the witness came. Not while intoxicated. Not during emotional frenzy. Not during blind ignorance. But months later, sober-minded, while genuinely seeking truth; on my knees, beside my bed, not able to fully comprehend what was happening. But it was glorious. And I cannot say more. And once that witness came, every former doubt collapsed beneath it. Since then, the Lord has led me through law school, through my MEd, and into the professional study of history itself — disciplines that sharpened my ability to evaluate primary sources, identify unreliable witnesses, recognize institutional bias, and separate evidence from assumption. Ironically, men like Stacker believe they are “following evidence,” while often beginning with the conclusion and filtering everything through it afterward. Today we possess more tools for discovering truth than at any point in human history. Vast archives. Digitized records. AI-assisted analysis. Linguistic reconstruction. Archaeology advancing yearly. And slowly, piece by piece, the picture becomes clearer. I testify that Jesus Christ lives. I testify that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is His Church. And I testify that spiritual witnesses from God are more reliable than the shifting conclusions of men. The evidence will continue emerging. It already is. Bit by bit, year by year, the world inches closer to truths it once mocked. And one day, the honest in heart will realize that God was telling the truth the entire time. Of this I testify, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

rationality and observation

Video here: https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2056253407539925451

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

"Kirk, if you were defending the truth of mormonism based on rationality and observation. How would you do it?"

Archetypes are premortal memory leaking through the veil of forgetting

 

https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2056240016305893784?s=20

Joseph Smith Finished the Sentence Carl Jung Could Only Start

Carl Jung was Freud's most brilliant student and eventual rival, a Swiss psychiatrist who spent fifty years documenting a mystery his materialist colleagues couldn't explain and his religious contemporaries didn't have the vocabulary to receive. Patients in locked wards described visions that matched Mithraic liturgies they could not have read. Aboriginal Australians and medieval alchemists and Tibetan monks produced the same throne, the same descending child, the same mother holding the dying son, with a fidelity no theory of cultural diffusion could explain. He called the patterns archetypes and the substrate they leaked from the collective unconscious, and he spent his career trying to say where that substrate lived. He reached for biology and the archetypes were too iconographically specific. He reached for a realm between matter and mind and could not say what it was made of. Jung had the data. He never found the metaphysics. He died in 1961 still reaching for a vocabulary that had been published one hundred and thirty years before he was born, in a frontier farmhouse two continents away, by a boy who would never read a word he wrote.

Joseph Smith finished the sentence Jung could only start. The archetypes are not neuropsychological evolutionary grooves carved into the brain by a million years of savanna life. Archetypes are premortal memory leaking through the veil of forgetting. We knew the Ancient of Days, which is why the Wise Old Man recurs in every culture that has ever drawn one. We beheld the Begotten Son in council before the world was, which is why the Divine Child surfaces in every mythology from Horus to Mithras to the manger at Bethlehem. We stood before a fourfold throne attended by living creatures, which is why the mandala appears in cultures that had no contact and no shared ancestry. The mormon endowment is not pedagogy and it is not theater — it is anamnesis in liturgical form, Plato's word for the soul recognizing what it already knew. The temple does not teach. It triggers. A new convert kneels at a veil in New York or Manila or Salt Lake and weeps without knowing why, because the body knows what the mind has been made to forget. The forgetting was the local condition. The remembering is the older fact.

Nowhere does the leak run harder than around the Mother. She is the most universally attested archetype in the human record and the most ruthlessly suppressed in the canonical traditions of the West, which is exactly what produces compulsive symbolic return across three thousand years. She is ancient Israel's Asherah, whose carved pillars stood beside Yahweh's altar in Solomon's temple, we know this from inscriptions dug up at Kuntillet Ajrud, not from Mormon apologetics. Josiah's reformers tore them all down. She is the Queen of Heaven whom the women of Jerusalem in Jeremiah 44 refuse to stop worshipping even after their city has burned. She is Sophia in Proverbs 8, present at creation. She is Shekhinah in rabbinic tradition, the feminine presence of God who goes into exile with her people. She is Isis nursing Horus, copied so directly by Christian iconography that the earliest Madonna paintings are nearly indistinguishable from the Egyptian originals. She is Guanyin in China, Tara in Tibet, Demeter at Eleusis, Inanna descending through seven gates and hanging dead on a hook for three days a thousand years before Christ. She is every Black Madonna that Catholic peasants knelt before while their bishops told them it was the Virgin and their bones told them it was something older. Three thousand years of women weeping at the feet of statues, three thousand years of carved Asherahs hidden under floorboards when the king's men came, three thousand years of peasants quietly renaming the goddess so the priests would let them keep her and the answer, when it finally came, came in two stanzas of a hymn written by a woman in Nauvoo. Truth eternal tells me I've a mother there. The whole suppressed feminine half of the human religious imagination, resolved in eight syllables.

The argument turns sharp when you walk the timeline. Between 1829 and 1844, on a frontier where critical biblical scholarship did not yet exist, Joseph Smith produced doctrines that mainstream academic religion would not begin to reconstruct for another hundred and fifty years. The premortal divine council, with its sons of God and its weeping anthropomorphic Father. The embodied God who walks and talks with Enoch face to face. Baptism for the dead, dismissed for centuries as a corrupt verse in 1 Corinthians, later confirmed by archaeology in the Roman catacombs as a real and widely practiced feature of the earliest Christianity. The Christology of the Book of Mormon, which collapses Father and Son in a way that maps cleanly onto the older Israelite pattern in which Yahweh is the Son of El Elyon, a pattern recovered from Ugaritic tablets that had not yet been dug up. Lehi's tree of life vision, with its virgin bearing a child beside a fountain of living waters, which is the exact iconographic cluster Margaret Barker would identify a hundred and seventy years later as the lost Wisdom theology of pre-exilic Israel. The Heavenly Mother. The deification of the saints. The ritual ascent through veils. Every one of these things has been independently documented in the most ancient strata of Israelite and early Christian religion since 1844, and not one of them was available to a frontier farm boy in 1829. The critic has to call this an extraordinary run of luck. The believer has Occam's razor. A boy walked into a grove of trees in 1820 looking for forgiveness, and walked out with a map of the universe the world's most learned men would spend the next two centuries slowly catching up to.

The Latter Day Saint kneeling at the veil in any temple in the world today is doing what the whole human race has been doing, in its dreams and its myths and its rituals and its philosophies and its physics, since the foundation of the world. Trying to remember.

Trying to go home.

_____